tarserv

A collection of tools that allow serving large datasets from local filesystem snapshots.

It is meant for serving big amounts of data to shell scripted receivers.

Process:

1. Take snapshot of directory containing data "/var/datadir/.snapshot12345".
2. Create build index of the snapshot and store it into index directory:
   $ createindex /var/index/snapshot12345.taridx /var/datadir/.snapshot12345
3. Serve snapshots via HTTP: $ tarserv -l 127.0.0.1:8080 -i /var/index/
4. Download snapshots via HTTP: $ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/snapshot12345/data.tar

Features:

• The tar files are created on the fly from the index file and filesystem snapshot/directory.
• Downloading is resilient, it allows range requests and so can be efficiently restarted.
• Furthermore the tar files produced contain a file ".version" that contains the source snapshot name.
• If given the "lastfile" GET parameter, the served snapshot will start with the file named by the parameter.
• All contained paths are normalized to current directory "./".