Network Block Device (NBD) clients for Windows or similar solutions
- by przemoc
Are there any NBD clients for Windows?
Strangely, I cannot find any, or I am searching for them in a wrong way.
Such client should be possibly a driver with front-end tool (may be a command-line one) allowing to create virtual drives and associate them with given hosts (or simply localhost) and ports where NBD servers are listening.
From user perspective virtual drive should be close to what physical drive is, so it should be accessible as something like \\.\PhysicalDriveX (maybe \\.\VirtualDriveX?), be visible in Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and mountvol tools at least.
(The only thing I found remotely close to NBD on Windows is ImDisk's proxy mode and companion tool devio, but AFAIK ImDisk only works at partition level (so no virtual drive) and devio uses different protocol.)
Secondary question is:
Are there any (preferably simple) Windows-specific solutions allowing creation of virtual drive delegating read/write request to user-space via some explicit way (like via TCP, IPC, DLL implementing given API, etc.)?