[Samba] Building two redundant servers without clustering

[Greg Freemyer]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 07:57:13 -0800, Mitch (WebCob) wrote:
> Hi M
> 
> > 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?
> [Mitch says:] I've never used this, and a quick google doesn't give me
> anything useful - what's the home page?
> 
They have their website hidden at http://www.drbd.org/    ;-)

But if you want to build a failover cluster with drbd as the
underlying network RAID1 layer, you will also want to look into
Linux-HA.  Linux-HA provides the heartbeat / failover logic typically
used to manage drbd.

http://www.linux-ha.org

FYI: I don't think Redhat supports any of the above.  (They have
alternate solutions they prefer.)  SUSE OTOH does support both
Linux-HA and drbd on there distro.  In particular with their SLES
server releases linux-ha/drbd is the recommended HA cluster solution
and they provide break/fix support.

Since drbd requires kernel patches, I would definately look into a
distro that has those built-in.

The linux-ha project is funded / sponsored by IBM and SUSE and has
thousands of production installs.

FYI2: I don't know if SUSE SLES officially supports linux-ha/drbd/samba or not.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer