[clug] Re: Clustering file systems, without excluding windows (From: linux Digest, Vol 56, Issue 14)

Miles Goodhew miles at m0les.com
Thu Aug 16 01:25:00 GMT 2007


On 15/08/2007, at 10:00 PM, linux-request at lists.samba.org wrote:
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 01:04:44 +1000
> From: Paul TBBle Hampson <Paul.Hampson at Pobox.com>
>
> [Disclaimer: This is work-related. Feel free to ignore it if you
> would expect that answering this should be paid-consultant work.]

[Disclaimer: I've never been inflicted with having to implement SAN/ 
clusered FSes, I'm just clutching at straws here]

> If I'm understanding correctly, I put disks in a server, mdadm them  
> into
> a raid away, partition it (prolly with mdp, but I guess LVM is  
> possible
> too) and export the partitions with either AoE or iSCSI.
...
> I then put a clustered file system on top of that, which runs on each
> machine accessing the exported block devices as local device names,  
> but
> distributing locking using something like DLM.

	Crikey! Sounds complicated. I'm not certain of what your goals are  
in having a clustered FS, for me, I'd just try NFS/SAMBA-shared fs  
from local raid-(0 +/- 1) disk first. If I really want parallel-host  
raid, then I'd look into PVFS. If I really need NBD/iSCSI/AoE, I'd go  
and read a book on the theory.
	Regardless, when dealing with Windows, I'd use the simplest possible  
approach that didn't require me to learn much about the platform or  
its ecosystem (i.e. Samba share from the closest, least-utilised node  
- maybe you could do some DNS round-robin magic from multiple servers  
for quasi load-balancing if you needed it). Honestly, without any  
malice, Windows can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned. Any  
development that gets me closer to its inevitable retirement makes my  
work less complicated.

> For the mail spool, that looks quite safe and easy. I then throw  
> vserver
> in front to handle POP3 (or simply an iptables rule + heartbeat would
> sort that one out) and I can run SMTP servers on as many machines as I

	... now I know you just fed some keywords into a document generator,  
didn't you.

M0les.



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