[Samba] samba in a High Availability Configuration

[Matt Schillinger]

The results I get now (on a Windows NT4 machine) is:

1. start a copy from a local drive to a samba served drive.

2. failover the samba server to the secondary.

3. the copy seems to stall.

4. As the secondary server comes online (or the IP comes online), the
copy issues an error.
	I don't know if the error is due to server state, or that the IP comes
up for a second with no samba server bound to the interface. This is why
i am interested in seeing if bind interfaces only option can be
accomplished without actually having the IP aliases bound, so that the
samba server can already be listening for the interfaces when the
aliases come up.


5. Immediately starting the copy over (from the secondary server serving
data) works fine.. no reconnects required.


Matt Schillinger
mschilli at vss.fsi.com


On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 19:06, Martin Pool wrote:
> 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 
-- 
Matt Schillinger
System Administrator
FlightSafety International
mschilli at vss.fsi.com
314-551-8403