Samba BDC and mirroring Homes

[Peter Samuelson]

[IVANYI Ivan <ivan.ivanyi at isb-sib.ch>]
> We have samba 2.0.0 running on Solaris 2.6 (Sparc) sharing out
> various directories and user homes.  Recently I've set it up for
> Win98 logins and all this is working fine.
[...]
> My question is what would be the best way to set up a Backup Samba
> server (under linux) as well as mirror user directories?

For mirroring, assuming you don't have any actual HA machinery in
place, `rsync' is probably as good as anything.

Make sure to mirror your smbpasswd file as well as the user
directories.  Also make sure your literal passwd files have matching
userid numbers.  (And don't just use NIS ... the idea is to operate
when the server is down.)

For takeover, you can set up an `smb.conf' file on the Linux box,
waiting to be used.  It should have `netbios name = SOLARIS_SRVR' in it 
so as to fool the Win98 computers when it needs to come online.  Other
than that the settings should be as similar to the Solaris smb.conf as
possible.  (Directory paths might be different, if you have the Linux
mirrors laid out differently from the Solaris originals.)

You didn't say if you meant planned or unplanned downtime on the main
server.  If you have unplanned downtime (i.e. a crash), obviously there
are no guarantees about the state of user files if they aren't being
mirrored in real time.  If you're talking about planned downtime, OTOH,
you will do pretty well if you just (a) do an rsync run, (b) stop Samba
on Solaris, (c) do another rsync, and (d) start Samba on Linux.  (Total
downtime should be well within tolerances for most Windows-conditioned
users.)  You could still have a few problems with locking, oplocking
and client races, depending on your usage pattern.

Peter