[Samba] A probably silly thought but...

[S Clark]

Here's a completely off-the-wall thought.

I have no idea if it would work, but would it be possible for you to combine 
the two RAID5 systems into a "software" RAID1 system?  Perhaps via iSCSI?

Kind of an overcomplicated method for doing what you need, but it WOULD keep 
both sets of RAID5 arrays in sync with each other in realtime, and would 
allow things to keep running without a pause even if one of the RAID5 systems 
failed.

If it's even possible...

(Told you it was a silly thought...)


On Wednesday 02 March 2005 09:19 am, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:33:34 +0100, Michael Gasch wrote:
> > hi,
> >
> > well, i was also wondering how to build up a very redundant solution for
> > my samba installations
> >
> > at the moment i'm using rsync twice a day to sync about 2TB amount of
> > data between two hardware raids (both raid5 with 2 hot spare)
> >
> > advantage: if filesystem is corrupt on one raid, the other raid is
> > normaly not affected
> >
> > disadvantage: because analyzing data to sync by rsync takes time it's
> > senseless to sync every our so you have no realtime backup (only 12h
> > before)
> >
> > how do you avoid this filesystem issue with drbd? doing rsync every
> > night seperatly? i don't know of statistics about filesystem damages
> >
> > cheerz
>
> DRBD would not help this problem.  As you say the filesystem
> corruption would immediately be duplicated to the alternate server.
>
> OTOH a good journelled filesystem combined with dual-power supplies
> and dual ups's should have a very high relaibility rate.  EXT3 seems
> to get mentioned as the most reliable linux filesystem, so go with
> that if reliability is your top concern.
>
> Greg
> --
> Greg Freemyer