[Samba] Using NAS as PDC Shares?

[Paul Henry]

On 15/03/06, Sean P. Elble <elbles at sessys.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Paul Henry wrote:
>
> > Dear List,
> >
> > We have just bought:
> >
> > * Dual AMD CPU, 8TB NAS, 4GB RAM (DNUK.COM) - SUSE 9.3
> > * Two Dell 2850, 3GB RAM, Dual Xeon 3.2GHz, 300GB Raid 5 - Fedora Core 4
> >
> > Now obviously we want to use the Storage ;-)
>
> First off, jealousy has set in. If you need anyone to "test" that
> equipment out, I don't think you'd find any shortage on this list. :-)

Ha. Just to make you more jealous: we have 2 switches, a 24-Port Cisco
2970 and a 12-Port 3com SuperStack III 3812, both can be Fibre. 5KVA
UPS. 8-Tape LTO2 Quantum Autoloader. All in a nice 42U Dell rack with
a Rack-mount Keyboard and LCD Display.

About £25k worth and just powered up today ;-)

>
> >
> > How would you guys recommend we proceed?
> >
> > Samba PDC on one 2850, LDAP Directory on second, and somehow mount the
> > storage for the shares?
> >
> > Or run the PDC on the NAS, and keep the LDAP Directory on a 2850?
> >
> > Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Oh, its for about 20-30 users ;-)
>
> Honestly, for that many users, PDC/LDAP performance probably will not
> matter much. It sounds as though transferring files will be your
> bottleneck, and even that will almost certainly be limited by your
> network, even if you are entirely gigabit based.

It's all GB, with some Fibre if things get hairy.

> Depending on your
> hardware requirements, and how "available" those Dell machines are, my
> ideal recommendation would be to mirror the two Dell systems, and run
> something like Heartbeat <http://www.linux-ha.org/> across the two. To use
> the storage from the AMD system on each of the Dell's, I'd mount the large
> file system via NFS on each of the Dell machines, with each of the Dells
> connected to the AMD system via "private" gigabit Ethernet (and by
> private, I mean on a switch dedicated to those 3 servers, basically).
>
> If that's not an option, I don't see any real reason why you couldn't just
> run the PDC on the AMD box, and LDAP on one of the Dell machines.
> Honestly, other than for reducing points of failure, that single AMD box
> could almost definitely do everything you want to do without issue. And
> regardless, I'd just love to be able to have that hardware. :-) Hope my
> $0.02 helps . . .

Will stick it all on the NAS and leave the 2850s for Audio/Video
encoding which is what they were bought for (but could be used), as I
don't think they need to be "that" available.

Thanks,

Paul.

>
>   > > Many thanks,
> >
> > Paul.
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>
> --
> +-------------------------------------------------+
> |  Sean Elble                                     |
> |  Virginia Tech                                  |
> |  Computer Engineering, Class of 2008            |
> |  Vice President, VTLUUG                         |
> |  E-Mail:   elbles at sessys.com                    |
> +-------------------------------------------------+
>