[Samba] Is building a load balance setup like this workable?

[Volker Lendecke]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 11:28:50PM -0600, Jack Downes wrote:
> Okay, before anything else, all I'm using samba for is a "Windows 
> looking" frontend to cups.  Eg, so the users don't know I'm getting rid 
> of the windows 2003 printserver and replacing it with a pair of linux 
> printservers (Samba/Cups)
> 
> I'd like to have 2 (or 3) printservers, all the same build of linux 
> (debian), cloned, etc.
> 
> users will be able to go to \\printserver and it'll pull up one of 
> 10.6.0.19, 10.6.0.20, etc.
> 
> Right now this works fine.  I've been serving over 505 printers on this 
> now for 6 months and it's a good thing.  The issue I have is growing 
> this to more than two servers - what if I want to have 5 servers, etc.
> 
> So, to my way of thinking, I'll have an nfs mount that is shared amongst 
> all the servers - /var/cache/samba, /etc/samba, /etc/cups, 
> /var/lib/samba, etc - whatever it is that samba changes.

No, don't do that. NFS sucks for Samba data.

> Now... I'm guessing I'll need a filesystem able to deal with multiple 
> servers using that mount as r/w, so maybe it'll be an iscsi mount with 
> the right fs. 

That would be something like GFS, glusterfs or some
proprietary cluster file system. But I think that would be
overkill for your case.

> Anyway, what I'm after is to make changes to one server and have it 
> propagate to all servers.  i'm not concerned if I need to have a 
> "special" server that I make the changes to, or if it's just that I can 
> make changes to any in the"cluster".  i'm hesitant to actually call this 
> a cluster as I'm not quite sure it's what I'm after.

rsync?

Printing is separate enough I think so that you can live
with an rsync master and have the clients choose one server
by dns round-robin or so.

Volker
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