[Samba] samba in a High Availability Configuration

[Martin Pool]

On 18 Feb 2003, Matt Schillinger <mschilli at vss.fsi.com> wrote:

> I'm sorry to post High availability oriented questions to this list, but
> I was wondering about some samba configuration parameters and what
> options are available.

You're welcome, this is on-topic here.

> What I am interested in, is seamless failover, completely hidden from
> the client in the middle of a copy.. Hopefully, they would only see a
> stall in the copy..

My understanding is that this is very hard (or impossible) to do at
the moment.  There is a lot of complicated statefulness in the CIFS
protocol (unlike, say, NFS) and so switching to another server in the
middle of an operation would, at the least, require a great deal of
new development work in Samba.  

There would need to be some kind of shared storage between the two
machines holding everything the server needs to know about active
connections.  This would be much deeper than just what's in the tdbs.
Perhaps somebody more experienced can give more details.

The best you can do is allow that connection to fail and then for the
client to reconnect.

-- 
Martin