[Samba] Using NAS as PDC Shares?

[Sean P. Elble]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Paul Henry wrote:

> Dear List,
>
> We have just bought:
>
> * Dual AMD CPU, 8TB NAS, 4GB RAM (DNUK.COM) - SUSE 9.3
> * Two Dell 2850, 3GB RAM, Dual Xeon 3.2GHz, 300GB Raid 5 - Fedora Core 4
>
> Now obviously we want to use the Storage ;-)

First off, jealousy has set in. If you need anyone to "test" that 
equipment out, I don't think you'd find any shortage on this list. :-)

>
> How would you guys recommend we proceed?
>
> Samba PDC on one 2850, LDAP Directory on second, and somehow mount the
> storage for the shares?
>
> Or run the PDC on the NAS, and keep the LDAP Directory on a 2850?
>
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Oh, its for about 20-30 users ;-)

Honestly, for that many users, PDC/LDAP performance probably will not 
matter much. It sounds as though transferring files will be your 
bottleneck, and even that will almost certainly be limited by your 
network, even if you are entirely gigabit based. Depending on your 
hardware requirements, and how "available" those Dell machines are, my 
ideal recommendation would be to mirror the two Dell systems, and run 
something like Heartbeat <http://www.linux-ha.org/> across the two. To use 
the storage from the AMD system on each of the Dell's, I'd mount the large 
file system via NFS on each of the Dell machines, with each of the Dells 
connected to the AMD system via "private" gigabit Ethernet (and by 
private, I mean on a switch dedicated to those 3 servers, basically).

If that's not an option, I don't see any real reason why you couldn't just 
run the PDC on the AMD box, and LDAP on one of the Dell machines. 
Honestly, other than for reducing points of failure, that single AMD box 
could almost definitely do everything you want to do without issue. And 
regardless, I'd just love to be able to have that hardware. :-) Hope my 
$0.02 helps . . .

  > > Many thanks,
>
> Paul.
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--
+-------------------------------------------------+
|  Sean Elble                                     |
|  Virginia Tech                                  |
|  Computer Engineering, Class of 2008            |
|  Vice President, VTLUUG                         |
|  E-Mail:   elbles at sessys.com                    |
+-------------------------------------------------+