[Samba] Mirrored samba servers.

[Richmond Dyes]

Thank you so much for your input.  I will start working on implementing 
many of your suggestions.

Nathan Vidican wrote:

>We're running a similar setup here actually, so a few notes that may be of
>assistance to you are as follows:
>
>#1 - RAID 0 + RAID 1 is poor for performance, if you want striping and
>mirroring together you should probably be looking to some sort of parity
>striping mode like RAID 5. We're using 3Ware Escalade 9000 series
>controllers to do just that now with WDC 250GB Raid-Edition Serial ATA
>drives now, and have been for quite some time. Performance is beyond our
>expectations and reliability has been key.
>
>#2 - Quit copying /etc/passwd, group, etc! Yuck... Try looking into
>pam_ldap, nss_ldap, and samba/ldap configuration. OpenLDAP (free, open
>sourced LDAP server), has replication services built right in, and can store
>your users, passwords, mappings, and much more with full failover
>capability. We're running FreeBSD/64bit, (on AMD Opteron machines), using a
>primary/slave LDAP configuration wherein data changes are replicated
>automagically using 'slurpd' - it was quite easy to setup and all the
>necessary documentation exists on http://www.openldap.org/ - all of this
>stuff comes 'standard' out of the box in the FreeBSD ports collection too :)
>
>#3 - Along with your new LDAP-based database of users, passwords, groups,
>mappings, etc, you might want to take a look at using some nice graphical
>user management system - just simplify life for yourself if you're not
>overly familiar with modifying entries in an LDAP tree - try LAM
>(http://lam.sf.net/) - it's been great and I'm usuing it at several
>installations now.
>
>#4 - pam_ldap & nss_ldap (mentioned above) - will allow you to use the same
>account information stored in the ldap database for BOTH unix and Windows
>worlds - signle sign on is key :)
>
>#5 - Setup samba for primary domain control, and setup the second machine
>for secondary (BDC) services. We maintain the same shares on both machines,
>and two dirs for login scripts; should the primary server fail for some
>reason, the login scripts are over-written by the second set which maps all
>the same drive letters over to the second server - not entirely transparent
>mind you, but worst-case scenario if the main server goes out, is that users
>logoff and back on and continue where they left off from half hour ago (data
>replicated using rsync as well).
>
>#6 - last advantage to this setup, involves a bit more complexity, but you
>can device the load/shares out amongst the two servers and replicate
>data/login scripts in both directions (as we're doing) - so your 'backup'
>server is actually primary for some shares and vice-versa to the main
>server, effectively distributing the load.
>
>#7 - split your smb.conf files; keep one for PDC, one for BDC, and one for
>all the shares that they replicate/share for each other - that way you can
>rsync shares configuration file without changing the whole smb.conf file
>(just use an 'include' line to include the shares from the main smb.conf's).
>
>#8 - use CUPS; CUPS will replicate the printers across both servers and
>allow for fail-over design as well... Still working on how 'transparent' we
>can make this - so I won't feed you any details or bull about cause' I
>really havn't tested it well yet.
>
>All-in-all, not a pure 'High Availability' solution; but given a complete
>catastrophic failure of our main/primary server, we can be back up and
>running to within a half hour's data in less than a minute if need be -
>fairly impressive, and definetly noteworthy.
>
>Lot of food for thought, know this stuff can be overwhelming... Might send
>an email back to the list with further details after you do some reading;
>ie: what O/S you're using, LDAP/etc questions etc... Trust me, after having
>done three of these setups now myself it's worth the effort. Good place to
>start is the Samba Domain Control How-To, (which DOES explain
>LDAP+samba+nss_ldap integration and provide example configuration files).
>
>--
>Nathan Vidican
>nvidican at wmptl.com
>Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
>http://www.wmptl.com/
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: samba-bounces+nvidican=wmptl.com at lists.samba.org
>[mailto:samba-bounces+nvidican=wmptl.com at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of
>Richmond Dyes
>Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 8:17 AM
>To: samba at lists.samba.org
>Subject: [Samba] Mirrored samba servers.
>
>
>I have a customer that is using 250 gig drives for his business data.  I
>have been using rsync to keep mirror copies of his data on a second
>machine.  In the last 3 months I have lost 2 of four drives, the last
>one being the system drive.  I have been doing a manual switchover. Each
>time rsync runs, I copy my samba conf files, passwd, shadow and group
>files from etc.  Has anyone setup a HA configuration for samba servers
>on separate machines. If so, where can I get information for this kind
>of setup?
>
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>  
>