Query: open source tool to audit files on multiple fileservers, locate dups etc

Hi all,

maybe a futile question, but I hope this is a moderately appropriate place to ask: I'm trying to find a tool (open source ideally of course) which helps audit files present on servers, stores this information centrally, and helps generate reports on disk space use.

This would be towards understanding how current disk space is used on a number of servers in a small workgroup, and to help with migrating consolidating this data in a sensible manner.

ie, my buttumed ideal model of operation might be,

local filesystems for info on all files

-all this data from client machines is then available centrally (possibly with real DB backend although implementation is secondary to end utility really) .. so that reports and analysis of the data can be generated, ie,

In my case I've got about 15 servers to audit, with about 1-2 having "significant" (500gb to 1 Tb) amounts of local storage .. and for which management of storage has been more-or-less non-existant in the past ..years .. and I'm hoping to shuffle things in a sensible manner, to put large chunks of duplicate data out of the picture; to put most-used data where it has best performance; and least-used data to lower-performance storage.

it is of course a bit of a mess, since most of these machines export via NFS to one another various bits of their storage .. so we have a lovely web of data..

I'm sure there are commercial "enterprise storage solutions" which could help me out, but I don't really fancy spending large chunks of $ on this if it is possible (ie, no budget :-)

If you can email comments to me directly, it would be appreciated.. timDOTchipmanATgmailDOTcom

Many thanks for your help suggestions,

Tim Chipman

(PS: I'll post a summary back to the group in ~2 weeks buttuming I get any-significant range of suggestions, for the benefit of all .. hopefully .. :-)