Large-scale Samba installs?

John E. Malmberg wb8tyw at qsl.net
Sat Aug 19 17:41:26 GMT 2000


"Christopher R. Hertel" <crh at nts.umn.education> wrote:
>
> Folks:  Who's got High Availability running?
>

According to a response I got a while back on the SAMBA-VMS list, there was
someone that admitted to having that.

On the OpenVMS environment, it requires no modifications from the standard
SAMBA installation for that platform as old as the 1.19 release.  All hosts
share the same smb.conf file.

One key point here is that for SAMBA in a HA OpenVMS environment is not a
failover condition.  Nor is it a master / slave.

All systems (Up to about 256 and over 100 miles apart) are able to load
share and service SMB connections.  (personally I would use a smaller system
for a LAN server :-)

Typically the disks will be connected to a shared interconnect and each host
can directly and simultaneously access them.

For TCP/IP connections by name, the DNS will redirect requests either by a
round robin as usual, or by a DNS that receives feedback from a load broker.

As I have not set one of these up for myself, I do not know how they dealt
with the NMBD advertisements.  It would seem to me that they were allowing
the name resolution of through netbios timeout, and then falling back to DNS
resolution.

I asked for more details, on the SAMBA-VMS list, but I did not get any
response.

There is no fail over procedure.  If a host fails, any open connections and
locks that are through that host are lost, but a reconnect will
transparently go to surviving systems as part of their load.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network






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