[Samba] Building two redundant servers without clustering

["M. Müller"]

Thanks a lot Charles. I will try to follow that route.

Malte Mueller

Charles Zealey schrieb:

> WE've gone the drdb route with similar requirements to yours.  Works 
> fine.
>
> Also we've set up heartbeat to do auto failover although not strictly 
> part of the requirement.
> Charles
>
> M. Müller wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>