[Samba] AoE (ata-over-ethernet) for sysvol ?

Sketch smblist at rednsx.org
Wed Mar 30 15:11:36 UTC 2016


On Wed, 30 Mar 2016, L.P.H. van Belle wrote:

> I was just reading : https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/ata-over-ethernet-aoe-on-debian-8-jessie/

AoE is like iSCSI.  It provides access to a block device over the network. 
Their example uses ext4, which is not a clustering filesystem, so you 
can't have multiple machines mounting the same ext4 filesystem at the same 
time.  You would need a clustering filesystem like GFS to provides shared 
storage that multiple clients could mount simultaneously.

> I was wondering, anyone tried AoE for sysvol, so i dont needs replication anymore.

Never tried it, but I would guess that shared storage would work for 
sysvol.  Though, I'm not sure what would happen if multiple users tried to 
modify the registry on multiple DC's at the same time, I suspect someone's 
changes would get lost.  Also, note that shared storage will emphatically 
NOT work for the rest of samba, as the database is not identical between 
DCs.

Still, it sounds like a lot of work to replace a couple of cron entries 
for rsync.  Note that by default the group policy editor will always 
connect to the PDC, so unless you have admins purposely connecting to 
other DCs, you really only have to worry about one-way replication from 
the PDC to other DCs.

One other pitfall is that unless you put sysvol on a SAN or some other 
kind of redundant storage setup, you are creating a single point of 
failure for it.  If your sysvol host system goes down, none of your DCs 
will be able to serve group policy.



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