[Samba] Building two redundant servers without clustering

["M. Müller"]

Hi,
my Fileserver lately refused to work anymore. I'm quite thankfull for 
that for that it was a bit slow anyway ;-)
My idea is to set up two relativley samba-hosts instead of byuing one 
"real" server with many build in redundancies. That can only work if I 
can manage to keep both filesystems in sync and I see two alternatives:
1.: Use drdb to build a RAID1 across the two host's filesystems. If  one 
host fails, the RAID runs in degraded mode but it runs - or does it 
crawl anyway because drdb is slow?
2.:  Use rsync. If I remember correctly, rsync was not supposed to run 
permanently as a daemon to keep two filesystems in sync(?). I could live 
with that, but how big is the overhead if I ran rsync every 5 or 10 minutes?

I want to achieve a trouble free passive fallover. I one host fails, 
people might have to login again and they even might have to wait up to 
30 minutes but then it has to work and they have to get all their files.

This is a public school and data is not worth real money most of the 
time, but once in year there are final exams written and if the server 
breaks down the whole exam has to be redesigned - that could bring me 
into the news.

Does anybody know of any better alternatives I didn't think of?

Thanks a lot,
Malte Müller
BBS1 Emden

P.S.: My current plans for hardware are two servers, each made up of:
ASUS A8N-SLI plus 2 SATA (WD or Seagate) drives as RAID0 or JBOD.