What Is Network Block Device (NBD)?

Have you ever wanted to access your computer storage over the network? Well, now you can! Like a standard block device, Network Block Device (NBD) are device nodes whose content is offered by a remote system. Do you know how it shows up as a disk when you plug in a USB drive? That same thing happens with NBDs, except it's over the internet. So instead of plugging in your USB drive to one machine and then using it on another machine, you can plug it in on one machine and use it on any other device with access to that first machine's network! You can access all the files on your machine from anywhere—even if they're stored on another computer! When you use NBDs, you gain access to a remote storage device through a virtual device node that appears in your machine's /dev directory. For instance, if you want to access an external hard drive connected to another computer via a USB cable, you must install an NBD server (such as NBD-server) on that computer and then configure your local machine to use it. You can do this by running the command "sudo nbd-client". The NBD-client program creates a device node in your local machine's /dev directory and mounts it as a local storage device. It allows you to read or write files directly from it using standard Linux commands such as cat or touch. NBD is a Linux kernel module that allows the client computer to use a remote server as one of its block devices. A request is sent to the server through TCP whenever the client computer wishes to read /dev/nd0. The server then responds with the requested data. It is helpful for stations having low disk space (or maybe even diskless, if booted from a floppy) since it allows them to use other computers' disk space.