Hi,

On Wed, 14 Dec 2005, John A. Goebel wrote:

> ++ 14/12/05 18:23 +0000 - <John Rowe>:
>
> Hi,
>
>>> What do you want to do with this filesystem?
>>
>> Aways a good question. I have a bunch of nonidentical  PCs running SL4.x
>> connected by gigabit. People can log into any of them and see their home
>> space. Currently I do this by having two of them as file servers, each
>> with a mirrored disk pair. Ideally I would like to have a single virtual
>> "/home" filesystem which I could add physical disks to and which is
>> resilient to any one node being down.
>
> I don't know what your load is like, but can't NFS do this for you and LVM?
>
> For the requirement of serving $HOME, NFS is a classic. Although I haven't
> tried it, NFS 4 has failover. Maybe someone else has a better suggestion?

Even if that's implemented now (is it?), wouldn't you still need some 
(cluster) filesystem shared between the servers?

AFS won't do the job either (no read-write replication). It would be 
possible to recover from a failed node quickly and transparent to the 
client, though.

The most promising solution in such a scenario to me seems to be something 
like that described in

   http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/hepix/talks/041020am/miers.pdf

Not trivial to set up, and I wonder how lock recovery would work, but the 
best low cost solution I know of.

Stephan

> For the requirement of disk management, LVM should do the trick. There are a
> bunch of papers online about using LVM/Raid.  You can load and configure using
> kickstart. I have a ks.cfg that I can send to you if you interested, but
> basically I used a version from the net and modified it for my use.
>
> Sounds like you don't need too fancy a configuration.
>
>> Needless to say, there's no budget for any fancy hardware.
>
> I know that feeling.
>
> John
>
>> John
>
> ##############################################
> # John Goebel <jgoebel(at)slac.stanford.edu> #
> # Stanford Linear Accelerator Center         #
> # 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025  #
> ############################################ #
>

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