vblade(8)

💖 vblade — the manual page, but make it make sense 💖

okay bestie, so this is the page for vblade (and its little sibling vbladed), from the System Manager's Manual. It's giving "storage but make it ethernet" and honestly? iconic. Let's get into it. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

vblade, vbladed — export data via ATA over Ethernet 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

vblade [ -m mac[,mac...] ] shelf slot netif filename

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

The vblade command starts a process that uses raw sockets to do ATA over Ethernet, acting like a virtual EtherDrive (R) blade. Yes, literally — it plays pretend and the network believes it. 👑

The vbladed script can be used to daemonize the vblade process, detaching it from your terminal and sending its output to the system logs. So it ghosts your terminal but tells the logs everything. no cap. 🌈

🎀 Arguments 🎀

• shelf — This should be the shelf address (major AoE address) of the AoE device to create. It's the main-character identity number fr fr.
• slot — This should be the slot address (minor AoE address) of the AoE device to create. The sidekick number, and equally required. 🫶
• netif — The name of the ethernet network interface to use for AoE communications. That's the little pipe it yells through.
• filename — The name of the regular file or block device to export. Whatever you point at is what the whole LAN gets to meet. 🙈

💜 Options 💜

• -b — The -b flag takes an argument, the advertised buffer count, specifying the maximum number of outstanding messages the server can queue for processing. Basically: how many texts can pile up in the inbox before it's a problem. 📥
• -d — The -d flag selects O_DIRECT mode for accessing the underlying block device. Straight to the point, no caching middleman.
• -s — The -s flag selects O_SYNC mode for accessing the underlying block device, so all writes are committed to disk before returning to the client. Slow? maybe. Safe? yes. periodt. 💾
• -r — The -r flag restricts the export of the device to be read-only. Look but don't touch, bestie. ✋
• -m — The -m flag takes an argument, a comma separated list of MAC addresses permitted access to the vblade. A MAC address can be specified in upper or lower case, with or without colons. It's the guest list, and if you're not on it, you're not coming in. 🚫
• -o — The -o flag takes an argument, the number of sectors at the beginning of the exported file that are excluded from AoE export (default zero). Like skipping the intro of a song. 🎵
• -l — The -l flag takes an argument, the number of sectors to export. Defaults to the file size in sectors minus the offset.
• -m, mac[,mac...] — see above, the comma separated MAC list.

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🌟 EXAMPLE 🌟

In this example, the root user on a host named nai exports a file named "3TB" to the LAN on eth0 using AoE shelf address 11 and slot address 1. The process runs in the foreground. Using vbladed would have resulted in the process running as a daemon in the background.

nai:~# vblade 11 1 eth0 /data/3TB

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⚠️ NOTES AND WARNINGS ⚠️

Jumbo frames girlies: read the README file distributed with vblade to learn about a workaround for kernel buffering limitations. This is not a drill, it's a real limitation, go read the README. 😭

At least one AoE initiator (WinAoE) has been found to enforce legacy CHS geometry for drives by discarding sectors. You should ensure that the underlying regular file or block device size is a multiple of 8225280 bytes (255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 512 bytes/sector) if you encounter filesystem corruption. That number is not a vibe, it's a warning: 8225280. Write it down. 🔥

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🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

Please report bugs to the aoetools-discuss mailing list. Tell them everything, they're nice. 💖

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Brantley Coile (brantley@coraid.com)

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and that's the whole page, bestie — this was vblade(8) from the System Manager's Manual, closing out with vblade(8) again because it loves a symmetry moment. stay slaying, stay synced, and go export responsibly. 💅✨🦋