[Samba] Ideas for distributed Samba servers

Robert LeBlanc robert at leblancnet.us
Tue Nov 3 18:23:07 MST 2009


I'm trying to think about how to setup a Samba system and would like to pick
the brains of some experts. We are looking up put a large amount of storage
~75TB in a central data center. We have some remote (ok, not remote, but
across slower links, ok if you consider several hundred clients over 1Gb to
be slow) locations that we would like to set up samba servers that 'cache'
the file system and serve it up to the clients in the building and sync with
the main data center storage. The idea is have a couple of TB that are
located in the building that serve up the Samba share. When a client
requests a file, if it's in the local cache it is served up from there, if
not then the Samba server grabs the file from the main data center and
serves it to the client. When a file is written, something like rsync is
used to transfer only difference back to the main data center. The problem
is that I'm not sure of a file system that does this. We are using Lustre on
our HPC, but this won't do what we want.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Robert LeBlanc
Life Sciences & Undergraduate Education Computer Support
Brigham Young University


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