[Samba] samba high availability

[David Schlenk]

Ryan Suarez wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> We're running samba 3.0.21a with cups on debian to serve printing and 
> automatic driver download to XP clients.
> 
> I'm looking into setting up a Linux-HA printing system with heartbeat in 
> active/passive mode.  Sorry, i'm new to this.  From what I read, if a 
> failure is detected on one node the other will take over and startup 
> it's samba services.
> 
> My question is how do I keep the samba print queues,drivers, etc. synced 
> between the two machines?
> Can I use NFS to store the samba installation and mount it on both 
> machines?
> Or use rsync?
> what files/directories need to be kept in sync?
> 
> much appreciated,
> Ryan
> 

That all depends on how you want to do it. You can share a SCSI array 
and use a STONITH device to really kill the other node before mounting 
it on the backup server. Or you can just keep things up to date with 
regularly scheduled rsyncs. Or NFS. Since you only mention printing, I'd 
recommend not using the shared SCSI and pick from either NFS or rsync. I 
use rsync, because I don't need instant updates across both servers as I 
only use samba as a print server.

As for the heartbeat stuff, I ended up just using the existing ethernet 
connections for heartbeat transmission. I have a logical IP set up on 
both machines for the samba service to use, and then I wrote a script 
that a failed heartbeat calls when a node failure is detected that 
brings up that interface and starts samba.

I can probably provide you with more technical details if need be.
-- 
David Schlenk
Operating Systems Analyst
Bethel University
david-schlenk at bethel.edu