samba cluster and nmbd

Michael Adam obnox at samba.org
Tue Jul 14 14:39:01 MDT 2009


Hi Evgeny,

Evgeny Privarotskiy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to find any information about nmbd in cluster environment.
> Ctdb project made it possible to run samba cluster. Ctdb's wiki
> recommends to configure DNS and WINS with cluster public IP's.
> However, it is not clear how does nmbd work in the cluster?
> Does it run on single node or there is some synchronization between
> different instances?
> Please share information if you have it.

The NetBIOS browsing stuff works with broadcasts. Since the nodes
in a samba-ctdb cluster should appear as _one_ cifs server with a
common netbios name and so on, when you start nmbd on mutliple
nodes, then the nmbd will compete with each other about who the
names belong to. Also the wins functionality of nmbd is not
replicated properly in the cluster (it is not a tdb database that
could be replicated by ctdb).

So my advice is this: do _not_ start nmbd on the cluster nodes!
(But if for some reason you really really want to start it,
start it on one node at most, but this won't work very well
either, since it will only register the current node's IP
addresses.)

The advice above for configuring the WINS server is referring
to an external WINS server: Just register all the public
IP addresses for the cluster's netbios name, just as you
create A records for each public IP in DNS.

Hope this helps.

Cheers - Michael
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