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Pool all your drives — local and networked — into one unified filesystem

drive-nmonit turns a cluster of Linux machines (hosts, SBCs, servers) into a single distributed storage system. It combines mergerfs for local drive pooling with GlusterFS for network distribution — giving you one mount point with the combined capacity of every drive in the cluster.

Architecture

Each node pools all its local drives via mergerfs into /mnt/local-pool. Then each node contributes its pool as a GlusterFS brick, creating a distributed volume mounted at /mnt/workspace on every machine.

How It Works

1. Local Pooling (mergerfs): Each node pools all its local drives (HDD, SSD, USB) into /mnt/local-pool. mergerfs is a union filesystem — it presents multiple underlying filesystems as one, preserving the individual filesystems so data is never at risk if the pool software fails.
2. Network Distribution (GlusterFS): Each node contributes its pool as a GlusterFS brick spanning all machines.
3. Unified Mount: Every node mounts the cluster at /mnt/workspace — one filesystem, total capacity.

Key Features

• Two-tier pooling: mergerfs locally + GlusterFS across the network
• Any drive type: Internal, external, USB — mix and match
• Safe by design: mergerfs preserves individual filesystems, so data is never at risk if the pool software fails
• Interactive CLI: Full menu-driven management with health monitoring and status dashboard on every launch
• Non-interactive mode: All operations available as direct commands for scripting and automation
• State detection: Auto-detects installed services, mount states, volume status, peer count, and managed drives on startup
• Web Dashboard: Real-time cluster status with per-node health indicators
• Samba/NFS export: Share the cluster with any OS
• Health checks: Nagios-compatible monitoring with alerting
• Systemd integration: All services auto-start on boot
• MIT Licensed: Free and open source

Interactive CLI

# Interactive menu mode (auto-detects system state on launch)
sudo ./drive-nmonit-cli

# Direct command mode (non-interactive, useful for automation)
sudo ./drive-nmonit-cli status              # Quick cluster status overview
sudo ./drive-nmonit-cli health --json       # Health check in JSON format
sudo ./drive-nmonit-cli health --watch      # Live-updating health dashboard (5s interval)
sudo ./drive-nmonit-cli install             # Install dependencies

Quick Start

# On ALL nodes: Install dependencies
sudo ./scripts/install-deps.sh

# On ALL nodes: Pool local drives
sudo ./scripts/setup-mergerfs.sh

# On PRIMARY node: Initialize cluster
sudo ./scripts/setup-glusterfs.sh --init

# On SLAVE nodes: Join cluster
sudo ./scripts/setup-glusterfs.sh --join <primary-ip>

# On ALL nodes: Mount workspace
sudo ./scripts/mount-all.sh

# Now /mnt/workspace has your combined storage!

Requirements

• Ubuntu 20.04+ / Debian 11+ / any systemd Linux
• One or more storage drives per node
• Gigabit Ethernet between nodes (10GbE recommended)
• All nodes must be able to reach each other on TCP ports: 24007, 24008, 49152–49251 (GlusterFS)
• Static IP addresses or hostname resolution (see templates/hosts.template)

Download

Source code + full documentation + CLI + dashboard + health monitoring. Just clone and run.