> Hey Stephen, > > > 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? > > Yes, that's right. Years ago, when I had to do this, I used > Kimberlite. Sorry, I don't know the current resources. > > I like the simple solution if it works, so here a recipe: > > http://www.linux-ha.org/HaNFS > > > 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. > > Also, you might want to poke around Linux HA site. The LAN mirror section > especially: > > http://www.linux-ha.org/RelatedTechnologies_2fLanMirroring > > John Just to add my 2 cents worth, I use linuxha.net (http://www.linuxha.net) which uses drbd as the shared storage device, so you don't have to spend the $k's on shared storage hardware, but use a network link between 2 nodes to replicate data. This also very easily provides HA NFS, using failover between two machines. Michael.