[Samba] Q: Samba Proxy or SAMBA Cluster?

[Michael Heydon]

Hi,

>
> The main samba server holds all files and all user information. The 
> CIFS Proxy in the remote location have a copy of all files and a copy 
> of the user database.
>
> If a user open a file the file will be locked on all servers (main 
> server and all cifs proxy). If the user write a file (new file or file 
> change) the file will be still locked until the file is written on all 
> servers.

This sounds really neat and I would love to get something similar 
running on our network. A lot of the issues that would need to be 
addressed for this to work are discussed in the high availability 
chapter of the samba-howto. To the best of my knowledge samba doesnt 
support anything quite like this (yet?). It can do DFS which can be used 
to make files appear to be on a local server however I dont believe it 
does any form of caching.

A while ago I considered using Coda between servers and then using samba 
to share out the data to the clients. Coda already addresses many of the 
issues you would face such as offline operation and change conflicts. At 
the time I didn't feel that setup would be stable enough for my 
production environment. Maybe in the future I will look into it again.


-- Michael Heydon