Integrating Popular Block Storage into Linux

Slides here

Repository for cceckman and slongfield's 2020 SIGBOVIK submission: Integrating Popular Block Storage into Linux.

The code / instructions in this repository allow you to use Minecraft chests as Linux block storage devices.

Howto

Prerequisites

• (Legitimate) access to Minecraft Java Edition
• A Linux host with:
  • Docker
  • A recent Go toolchain
  • openjdk-11-jre and openjdk-11-jdk
  • Apache Maven
  • e2fsprogs in PATH (e.g. mkfs.ext4)
  • Probably some other things we didn't notice we had. Sorry!

How-to

Clone this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/cceckman/popular-block-storage.git

Build everything:

$ ./do all

To run the Minecraft server and plugins:

$ ./run_mc.sh

The Minecraft server will run on port 4601; you can connect your Minecraft client to it right away!

The block storage server will run on port 4602.

With that running, connect the server to your filesystem:

$ ./run_blocks.sh my-directory

That will create a blocks file in a temporary directory, put an ext4 filesystem on it, and mount it at my-directory.