[Samba] Re: Possible to have two SAMBA srvs act as one?

[Andrew Morgan]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Michael Rignaz wrote:

>> On 09/10/2006 10:11 AM, Michael Rignaz escreveu:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> is it possible to share write locks amongst two samba servers?
>>> 
>>> We are experiencing performance issues all the time, because one
>>> location (location A) is connected via VPN to the main location
>>> (location B) and needs to access files hosted there on some samba shares.
>>> Now loc A gets its own server, but still files hosted in B need to be
>>> read/write accessed from A and vice versa.
>>> It would be really nice to have all files and shares on both servers.
>>> And when a file is locked on srv1 it's also locked on srv2.
>>> Is something like that possible?
>>> 
>>> Thnx in advance,
>>> Michael
>>
>> 	I hope this Wiki Page can help you. :)
>>
>> 	http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Clustered_Samba
>> 
>>
>> 	Kind regards,
>> 
>> - --
>> Felipe Augusto van de Wiel <felipe at paranacidade.org.br>
>> Coordenadoria de Tecnologia da Informação (CTI) - SEDU/PARANACIDADE
>> http://www.paranacidade.org.br/           Phone: (+55 41 3350 3300)
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>
> Thnx a lot for your reply.
> I'm a total newbie to clusters plus a linux beginner only.
> Could u tell me how advanced/tricky this is?
> I just setup three samba servers, cyrus imapd and two networks connected via 
> vpn with OpenVPN, this is all I'm capable of yet :)
> Can I just use cluadmin to cluster two samba services, or would I need to 
> cluster "whole machines"?Can't even try to get into it yet, since I have only 
> RHEL WS 4 and this doesn't support cluadmin. Maybe I'll install Debian and 
> try.
>
> Also it seems as if this would eat up a lot of bandwidth performance at least 
> in terms of latency.. when two smb servers are connected via a low bandwidth 
> vpn only, I feel as if this wasn't an option. What do you say?

Have you looked into WAN Accelerators?  These are typically hardware 
devices placed at each end of the WAN link which do some sort of fancy 
mojo to reduce the perceived latency of the link.  (Can you tell I have no 
clue how they really work?)

Short of replicating all the data to a local machine, it seems like a WAN 
accelerator is the only other choice.

 	Andy