[Samba] Samba Read-only redundancy

[Michael Coburn]

We do much the same thing at our site where we load balance across a 
number of NFS machines that frontend our SAN via DNS round robin'ning 
with very low TTLS on just those file-serving machine records -- it 
works quite well.  I would expect that Samba should behave in a similar 
fashion.  One thing you should ensure is that your Win2k3 machines are 
doing hostname lookups via DNS and then WINS.

The Samba wiki has info on the challenges of clustering.

http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Clustered_Samba
--
Michael Coburn
Enterprise Systems Administrator
Jupiterimages

Michael C. Wu wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> We are setting up some READ-ONLY Samba servers, mounted from the same
> volume on a SAN.  The files are media files to be played out by
> Windows Media Servers mounted on Win2003.
>
> Here are my thoughts about possible configurations, would someone mind
> letting me know what would the best option be?
>
> A) DNS Round Robin
> Have foo.domain resolve to 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3.
>
> 10.0.0.1
> 10.0.0.2
> 10.0.0.3 all have the same samba fileshare mount names configured.
>
> Suppose WMS_server.domain connects to \\foo.domain\mount, and is
> connected to 10.0.01, and 10.0.0.1 dies, WMS server retries, what
> would happen?
>
> B) Load balancing via VIP
> Same setup, except that we give the VIP a DNS called foo-vip.domain
> and let the Win2003 servers mount via \\foo-vip.domain
>
> C) Samba HA with DRBD
>
> What is the better route?  Would all 3 work? I'd like to make it the
> simplest solution while remaining with redundancy to some extent.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Michael