[CentOS] Gfs and storage

Pasi Pirhonen upi at papat.org
Fri Aug 26 04:21:52 UTC 2005


Him,


On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 01:12:40PM -0700, Ajay Sharma wrote:
> 
> I was looking this for a while and couldn't find any decent 
> documentation on how to do GFS "on the cheap".  I ended up just using 
> NFS for my simple two-node web farm.  The ultramonkey.org packages make 
> it super easy.
> 

It's the same method, which is described for Oracel/RAC - FireWire and
shared disk on that media.

Linux sbp2 driver for FireWire media does support 'nonexclusive login'
where one can mount the same disk between N nodes. I'ver personally
back few years ago verified three node RAC-installation with this
method (with shared SCSI one can only get up to two :)

Sharing SCSI-bus is the next method, which is working pretty decently
too for evaluation purposes. Just stuff in few SCSI-adapters, change
the controller IDs so that those would not conflict and stack up some
extrernal box with two connectors between them. Obviously this is not
easy target being bootable media, but one doesn't want to boot from
that media on GFS anyway.

Third method, which is just cheapest, would be iSCSI. There are 

http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net/

which is extremely stable, but not so user friendly as there isn't much
of tools available. One would make one box act up as iSCSI-server and
use clients to that. This is what i use at my LAN for iSCSI-server ATM.
Actually my NFS-server acts up as iSCSI-server too now as i've tested
this iSCSI-part being stable and propably not crashing up my NFS-server
:)


I don't know about cheap, but those are three methods to tacle
GFS-testing w/o FibreChannel etc. that are not normally available for
home LABs :)

If someone should have 'few extra QLA2X00-adaters' available, the

http://www.pavitrasoft.com/

Can make you 'my own little FC-box' from any linux box. There aer
evaluation licenses available, so you can try before you buy.

I've personally spent a lot of time debugging problems with this piece
of software. It's not workin aOK, but recently it has been extremely
stable - even with the older QLA2200-boards (which i do have a pile).




-- 
Pasi Pirhonen - upi at iki.fi - http://iki.fi/upi/



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