? Setting up Samba-Mirrors for Home-Drives

[Matthew Kirkwood]

On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Leif Jakob wrote:

> 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.

Is there a reason that a single Linux machine isn't an option?

> 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.

It rather depends.  The samba team know the stability of the various bits
of code better than I do, but my instinct would be to have a single
machine serving as a PDC with the HEAD CVS branch (only really doing
authentication with SMB) and serving files via several front-end boxes
which mount the server's filespace via Coda (which can do persistent
caching) which re-export the files via the stable code with
security=server.

The load-balancing thing may be harder - I don't know how much client-side
WINS caching Windows does...

Unless you really need to scale big, I can't really imagine a better
solution than a big, beefy Linux (Sun, SGI) box with some RAID, though.

Matthew.