Redundant Samba Server

[Gong Wei]

Hi all,

Is it possible to set up two Samba servers to minimize the service down
time, using current 2.0.3 under Linux?

We plan to setup two servers as master/slave.  So normally the slave server
will not in production (nmbd and smbd will not be started).  It only starts
if it detects the master server, whose NetBIOS name is MASTER1 fail.

So how should we configure the second Samba server such that it can
advertise itself as MASTER1 also?  And more importantly, after this second
Samba server starts up, all newly boot up clients should connect to this
one.

It seems that merely copy smb.conf and all files in the private directory to
the slave server is not enough .... ^_^

Another problem that we haven't found the answer is that what if the Master
server goes back online while the slave server is in production?

I am not sure whether this can be done or not.  The base line is that we
hope there can be some mechanism to provide some level of redundancy.  At
least all the clients which boot up "after" a server crash should be able to
switch to a backup server in a transparent/automatic manner.

Please elaborate, thanks!


Regards

Gong Wei (ccegongw at nus.edu.sg)