[Samba] Samba server in a failover environment

[Hsu, Cheng (Consultant)]

Hello, Samba Gurus .....

I have a Samba server running on a pair of SUN servers (server-a  and
server-b).
The samba shares are NFS mounted from a third SUN server (server-c).
I installed Samba 2.2.7a on the paired SUN servers under /usr/local/samba
(Samba 2.2.7a is locally installed on server-a and server-b, since
/usr/local/samba
is local on the rootdisk.)

The failover environment works like this:
.  I manually start up Samba daemons (smbd and nmbd) on server-a
.  Users are able to map Samba shares to their PCs, and they can read and
write
.  While users have their files open, I manually stop all Samba daemons on
server-a
.  Then, I manually start up Samba daemons (smbd and nmbd) on server-b
(note that server-a and server-b have the same smb.conf file under
/usr/local/samba/lib)

a)  We tested this failover environment, it didn't work.  Those open files
are not accessible
    after we failed over Samba daemons to server-b.

b)  I manually changed the startup script so that server-b will explicitly
join
     the NT domain, then everything works fine.

c) Then, I manually stop Samba daemons on server-b, and start Samba daemons
on
    server-a and explicitly join the NT domain, and everything still works.

d) I can manually fail over Samba daemons between server-a and server-b.
Everything
    works as long as I explicitly join the NT domain.

Our UNIX SAs and NT SAs told me that it is not required to explicitly join
the NT domain
after failover.    But my experiment shows that I MUST explicitly join the
NT domain
in order for everything to work.

I cannot find anything which can help me understand how to properly failover

Samba daemons between two UNIX (SUN) servers.

Cheng Hsu
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