6

I've grown up a Debian/Ubuntu guy and I'm learning Fedora by trying to recreate the services my Ubuntu trusty box currently provides. However, I'm trying to recreate a union mount and don't see any obvious way to do it.

Each user on my Ubuntu-based server has a "media" folder, with subfolders for movies, music, etc. Using aufs-tools, I create a (read-only) union mount of userA...userZ's "media" folders at /srv/media. Then using Samba, my Plex box can access that combined media folder over the network.

It appears nothing reasonably resembling aufs-tools is available via the standard repos (nor via rpmfusion). I've seen some mentions online of UnionFS, but I also saw something about it having fallen out of favor. I don't want to use FUSE, because this union mount is based on several users' media folders. What's the preferred solution for creating union mounts on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS servers these days?

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

Fedora tries to not deviate very far from the "mainline" upstream kernel from kernel.org. AuFS isn't in that kernel, so it isn't in Fedora.

We do, however, have an option: OverlayFS. Upstream documentation is available on kernel.org, and here's some quick examples on Fedora.

And, as pretty much always, the Arch Linux documentation is excellent and (as often the case) is applicable to Fedora as well. From that page, a line like this in /etc/fstab will do it:

overlay /merged overlay noauto,x-systemd.automount,lowerdir=/lower,upperdir=/upper,workdir=/work 0 0
3
  • 1
    Note that overlayfs is available in recent RHEL (7.1+) as a tech preview (and therefore also recent CentOS).
    – mattdm
    Feb 27, 2017 at 21:05
  • 1
    Note that OverlayFS is total crap compared to AuFS
    – Tomas M
    Oct 11, 2017 at 8:16
  • 1
    "Total crap" or not, it's available in the mainline kernel and thus supportable and sustainable, while AuFS is not. (Also, "total crap" is untrue.)
    – mattdm
    Oct 11, 2017 at 10:35

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .