Samba queries.

[Esh, Andrew]

FYI: The address for the "samba" mailing list should be 'samba at samba.org'.

We here at Tricord have made use of Samba for High Availability, Clustering,
and Load Balancing. All of those issues involved setting up services and
features outside of Samba, however. Since Samba is a network service, High
Availability and Load Balancing are accomplished by simply providing those
features, and expecting Samba to accept connections that are requested of
it. Because we have a Cluster, a Distributed File System, and Load
Balancing, we get High Availability too.

In the area of Clustering, the only problem we had was with winbind. The ID
map database has to match on all clustered servers, so that the same person
is seen to own a file every place that file is visible.

Since winbind has not been extended to be distributed yet, I came up with a
hack: I added an option to make winbind use the database in read-only mode.
Then I run winbind in read-write mode on one node, and I distribute the
resulting database to the other nodes in the cluster for them to use in
read-only mode. I haven't submitted this change to the group, because I am
waiting for the Samba Development Team's version of distributed winbind. I
expect that version will use networking to immediately resolve ID requests
from the master database, rather than wait for database distribution like
mine does. However, if you guys want my patch, you can have it, but it's
silly. (I have other points to make about this issue, but they are not
germane to this topic.)

The reason we didn't have any other problems with clustering is because we
use a distributed file system. That takes care of file concurrency. Samba is
just an interface, so it just represents that file system to the clients.
Each copy of Samba doesn't need to know about the others.

-----Original Message-----
From: Prasad, Sreenivasa [mailto:sreenivasa.prasad at digital.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 7:55 AM
To: 'idra at samba.org'; 'samba-technical at samba.org'; 'samba at smaba.org'
Subject: Samba queries.


Hi,

	Could you please clarify some of my doubts.

   Does SAMBA have some clustering capability for load balancing and high
availability.
   If so, any pointers/info is really helpful.

Cheers,

/Prasad.

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