How can I tie togeather extra space on Macintosh desktops with a distributed filesystem?

Question

I have access to a bunch of Mac desktops, the hard drives of which are under-utilized. I want to set up a distributed filesystem to gang them together into one large virtual volume. The server has to be able to run as a normal user.

I've tried PVFS2, but it's designed for Linux and isn't running well on OSX (hangs the clients on write).

What should I use instead?

Answer 1

The Andrew File System (AFS) is a very mature distributed file system with OS X support. Check out OpenAFS.