[Samba] gpfs + sernet samba + ctdb + transparent failover confusion

[Sabuj Pattanayek]

Hi all,

We're running gpfs 3.5.0.12 (5 total nsds & quorum servers, 2 nsds running
samba), sernet-samba 4.1.4-7, and ctdb 1.0.114.7-1 and trying to get
transparent failover to work from a windows 8 client. We have ctdb failover
working, i.e. if I run mmshutdown on one of the nodes the IPs failover in a
few seconds after the GPFS mount is unmounted. For our transparent failover
test, I open up firefox and start downloading a large file, e.g. a centos
6.5 iso into the mapped network drive being served up by one of the samba
servers. Then I run an "mmshutdown" on the samba server the client is
connected to and as soon as the mount disappears on the server the download
stops and firefox throws an error. I was expecting that with transparent
failover that the download would "hang" until the IPs had a chance to
failover and the download/writes would continue but that didn't seem to
happen.

Any idea on how to get this to work? Do we need to use ctdb 2.5.1? What's
the difference between the sernet-samba provided ctdb 1.0.114 and the ctdb
2.5.1 line ? I tried to install the samba.org provided ctdb 2.5.1 RPMs but
it failed with :

ctdb >= 1.0.115 conflicts with sernet-samba-4.1.4-7.el6.x86_64

I also created rpm's using the spec file from the ctdb-2.5.1 sources and
got the same error. Looks like using "make install" would be the only way
to get this installed, but even then why is sernet-samba requireing the
1.0.x line? Again, does it even matter with the original issue with
transparent failover?

Thanks,
Sabuj