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 # > ############################################ # > -- ---------------------------------------------------- | Stephan Wiesand | | | | | | DESY - DV - | phone +49 33762 7 7370 | | Platanenallee 6 | fax +49 33762 7 7216 | | 15738 Zeuthen | | | Germany | | ----------------------------------------------------