Signal9Signal9 — home
online
back to labs

Network Block Device: Attach and Mount a Remote Build Disk

MediumLFCS Prep20 min
The brief

The release pipeline's artifact disk lives on the storage host stor01, which serves several disks over NBD (the network block device protocol). The ticket in /root/case/brief.txt names the export you need.

Attach that export to a free /dev/nbdN on this box, mount it read-write at /srv/builds, copy the release notes into the disk's incoming/ directory, and make the setup survive a reboot through /etc/nbdtab and /etc/fstab. The other exports belong to other teams.

For this lab stor01 resolves to 127.0.0.1: nbd-server runs on this box exactly as it would on a separate host, so everything you write still travels over the NBD protocol. The box has no systemd; on a real host the nbdtab entry is brought up at boot by nbd@nbd0.service (systemctl enable nbd@nbd0). Grading finds which NBD device holds the export by its filesystem UUID, reads the release notes back through /srv/builds, and parses /etc/nbdtab and /etc/fstab.

What you'll do
  • List the exports an NBD server offers and attach one by name
  • Mount a filesystem from a network block device
  • Persist the attachment in /etc/nbdtab and the mount in /etc/fstab with _netdev

Hands-on lab: you work on a real Linux box in your browser, graded on the machine's actual state.