GMail-RAID5

By popular demand…

Disclaimer: This is neither useful nor even usable and of course in no way reliable. Do not try this at home or at all.

Using multiple GMail accounts via GMailFS – a fuse driver using libgmail.py – and Linux Software RAID as a RAID5 storage.

1. Prerequisites:
• $n GMail accounts
• fuse
• libgmail.py
• gmailfs
• mdadm
2. Mount your GMail accounts

for i in `seq 0 $n`; do
  mount.gmailfs -p -o username=Daniel$i none /mnt/gmailfs$i
done

3. Create data spaces

for i in /mnt/gmailfs*/; do
  dd if=/dev/zero of=${i}loopfile bs=5M count=2
done
This will take some time, depending on your available upstream bandwidth and CPU cycles. (GMailFS/fuse are ressource hogs. Later versions seem to scale better.) This gives you a 10MB file in each account. The default GMailFS “blocksize” is 5 MB iirc.

4. Assign your device nodes

LOOPS=
for i in /mnt/gmailfs*/loopfile; do
  LOOPS+="$(losetup -f) "
  losetup -f $i
done

5. Define your RAID

mdadm --create /dev/md0 -n $n -l 5 $LOOPS

6. Create a filesystem

mkfs.xfs /dev/md0

7. mount

mount /dev/md0 /mnt/gmailraid

Yes, this is sick. Yes, it wastes enormous amounts of resources.