Peter Blajev wrote: > I have 4 systems and each one of them has a partition I'd like to be remotely > accessible on the other 3 systems. > > In other words System1 has Partition1. Systems 2,3,4 should be able to > remotely mount Partition1 from System1. Also System2 has Partition2. Then > systems 1,3,4 should be able to remotely mount Partition2 from System2 and so > on. > > I tried NFS and it works but only in the ideal world. If one of the systems > goes down the whole NFS cross-mounting makes the other systems somewhat > unstable. It's a known issue and I believe you guys are aware of it but I > just had to see it myself. > > What would you recommend? What is the best practice for doing that? > > Unfortunately SAN and NAS are not really an option due to some financial > restructions. I'm thinking SMB...? Would that work? > if system 1 depends on system 2, AND system 2 depends on system 1, I dunno, but you're asking for problems. the normal way people do this is to designate a SERVER, and have all the other systems mount data off this server. the server should be designed and used to maximize uptime. SMB is a Microsoft Windows protocol, and rather foreign to Unix/Linux, fine for linux<->windows use, but no good for linux<->linux. NAS is simply a turnkey NFS fileserver. SAN is a block storage setup, and doesn't itself allow for sharing between systems, except in specific cluster configurations. [SAN disks]--san---[server system]----NFS----[client systems] would be what you'd end up with