[CentOS] near-realtime file system replication

Sat Oct 6 17:51:36 UTC 2007
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Whats available for doing near-realtime master->slave file replication 
between two CentOS systems?    

Cronjobs running rsync won't cut it.   

Ideally, I'd like something that works like SLONY-I does for Postgres 
databases, where all file system block level transactions on the master 
get replicated to the 2nd system on a 'as fast as practical' basis (a 
second or two of lag is acceptable).    If the slave is offline or 
connectivity is interrupted, these transactions should be journaled so 
they can be played back when things resume.


I'm open to other approaches, so far I've found very little in this 
category... I briefly considered using LVM mirroring over iscsi to the 
slave, but A) this is synchronous, B) recovery from a service 
interruption would require remirroring the whole volume.

I've been reading about GFS but am somewhat confused as to its 
capabilities.   The examples given on redhat's pages seem to involve 
shared storage (SAN or whatever) and distributed cluster access, I don't 
need any of that, just simple master->slave one way asynchronous 
replication.