? Setting up Samba-Mirrors for Home-Drives

Leif Jakob sambalist at pinguin.uni-muenster.de
Thu Apr 1 14:57:03 GMT 1999


Hi List!

I would like to replace a big NT-Server serving homedirectories
only for about 150 Users (WinNT 4.0) with a pool of some
Linux (Intel) machines running Samba.

To increase performance i thought about using multiple machines (3-4)
with DNS-load-balancing.

The machine running the DNS will periodicly check all mirrors
and remove them from the IP-chain if malfunctioning. Clients will
not notify that the IP-address of a broken machine has changed.
Only changes on open file may be lost but the user can continue
to work.

So far so good, but how do I set up these machines to write
changes on there local drive to their mirrors via NFS (or
something else). The problem is that there is no master-disk. The
problem could be solved with making Samba copy each write access to
multiple directories - but that would cause heavy code modification.
I would have to replace all file operations with my clones.

Performance may be increased if the mirroring is done with
seperate network devices.

Is there a simpler attempt - RAID over NBD (network block devices
- new in Kernel 2.2)? Could a BeoWolf-Cluster be a solution? I
heard that AFS could do something like that but there is no
free stable server for Linux.

I'm sure there are more people interested in such kind of solution:
Replacing expensive high performance servers with multiple cheap
servers without RAIDs and gain redundancy and increased performance.

Thanks in advance.


Leif Jakob

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