[Samba] GFS and samba

[sandra-llistes]

Hi Andrew,

We open a bug-request to GFS-developers and send an e-mail to 
linux-cluster list but received no answers yet.
As I said the files aren't accessed simoultaneously, one Node (node1) 
is sharing information about programs used in our university (share1), 
this share is used by windows clients that only are connected to node1.
Other clients (Linux) connect to node2 that shares the same, but that 
clients aren't accessing to the same information because the programs 
used are different. Any idees in order to debug it?
It's good news to know that "clusterizable" samba is a proposal and I 
will subscribe to samba-technical to read about that. I read too that 
we can put samba configuration and files in the GFS filesystem in 
order to "share" states,information,locks and so on.
We are mounting a test environment with two test servers, one GFS 
filesystem and samba to see what configurations can be used to make it 
working better.
Best Regards,

Sandra

Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 17:20 +0200, sandra-llistes wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> We have two Fedora 5 Servers clustered with GFS. We installed samba 
>> and exported the same shares in both of them.
>> All went fine at first, with people accessing to theirs own files and 
>> so, but for some programs (minitab, matlab, ...) people need to access 
>> the same file at once. Then samba begins to fail and clients hang. In 
>> order to fix samba is necessary to restart the service. We've tried to 
>> put the shares in a filesystem without GFS and all goes well, people 
>> can access the same file without problems simultaneously.
> 
> This certainly looks weird.  If the files are only ever accessed from
> one node, then it *should* work, but I don't know if this is something
> that has been tested with GFS specifically.  
> 
> Serious damage starts to happen when we have Samba accessing the same
> files on both nodes, because all the state information isn't shared
> between nodes.  (Proposals for a scalable solution for Samba to do this
> are due on samba-technical in the next week).
> 
> If you are only using one node for Samba, it should be the same as a
> local non-cluster filesystem, so perhaps raise this with the GFS
> developers.
> 
> Andrew Bartlett
>