Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 15:44 -0800, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Ugo Bellavance ugob@camo-route.com wrote:
I'd take a look at drbd (www.drbd.org) while you're reading on heartbeat. I use it for web servers, but I'm not sure if it would be suitable for file servers.
There is a lot more to handling network file services -- especially when it comes to locking and controlling write access -- that web servers don't have to worry about. ;->
I use drbd and heartbeat on a samba domain controller that has failover ... BUT, you can't use both machines at the same time.
AND, it takes a GiB connector to keep the files in sync ... trying to do it via a WAN connection would, I think, be fairly impossible.
I've managed to keep two moderately busy servers in sync using frequent rsync over a WAN VPN tunnel. However, that tunnel was over an OC-3 link. I suspect it would be a rather painful affair over DSL/cablemodem or even a few bonded T1's. Something like drbd that treats a remote volume as a device would definitely not work on such a "skinny" link unless the servers were relatively lightly used.
Cheers,