[Samba] Samba 4 Clustering

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Mon Mar 20 11:49:34 GMT 2006


On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 17:14 -0600, Abhijith Das wrote:
> Hi List,
>  From what I've read in many mailing lists, Samba 3 is not truly 
> clusterable.
> 
>  From what I understand, people have been able to cluster Samba with 
> varying levels of success. Transparent failover and active-active file 
> serving ( 2 or more smbs serving the same files (through a cluster 
> filesystem like GFS) from multiple cluster nodes simultaneously ) are 
> two things that are not possible with the current Samba. Or are there 
> more issues as well?
> 
> There were discussions however, that mentioned clustering being scoped 
> into Samba 4. Can somebody elaborate on clustering support in Samba 4?

So, when the relevant layers were constructed in Samba4, one of the
design goals was to allow clustering, because this is a feature vendors
of clustered filesystems have wanted, and because this kind of thing is
harder to add later if the problem is ignored.  The comments you may
have read presumed (at the time) that retrofitting this to Samba3 would
be particularly difficult.

However, since that time, a large amount of work has been done on the
Samba3 codebase to allow clustering in practise, and I expect to see
further work in this area. (Samba4's cluster capabilities should be
powerful, but only exist in theory, there is no clustered backend yet).

I hope that clarifies things a bit.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College  http://hawkerc.net
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