distributed file system

Vieri · l33t Joined: 18 Dec 2005 Posts: 887

I have several SAMBA shares that I would like to "distribute" over several Gentoo machines on the same LAN.

I'm only interested in fault-tolerance.

Suppose I have the directory /SAMBA/share1 on an ext3 filesystem on server1 and that smb.conf is configured to share /SAMBA/share1 as read/write.

I'd like to have server2, 3, 4. etc. to have the same share, content and read/write access.

Any SMB client (LAN user) should be able to access \\server1 or \\server2 or \\server3, etc. and be able to read AND write to "share1" (or any other share, if it's simpler).

Any changes made in \\server2\share1 should propagate to \\server1\share1, \\server3\share1, etc... Same thing for server1, server2, etc.

If one of the servers is down then the ideal situation is that its contents be updated by the other servers as soon as it gets back online. But that's not critical - I coudl initially do an rsync to update it and then resume it as a normal cloud node.

Can this be done ONLY with ext3 and Samba and some other tool (like a "union" rsync that suncs both ways?)?

Or do I need to setup a special filesystem such as http://www.xtreemfs.org/ ?
If so, any suggestions as to which system I could use (most tested, most supported, already-in-kernel)?

Thanks,

Vieri

Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

You could rely on rsync, but unless very few changes are being made, you will have a high probability of losing changes people have made to files. You'll need something more than samba and rsync to get the redundancy you want.

There are other alternatives besides the file system you mention, if you do some research.
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Vieri · l33t Joined: 18 Dec 2005 Posts: 887

Well, I think that SAMBA has its own clustering solution if used with CTDB:

http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/CTDB_Setup

I just don't know how it is compared to filesystem-level clustering (ie. would one be better off using Samba+CTDB on ext3 or plain Samba but with its shares on a Lustre file system, or similar fs?).
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John R. Graham · Posted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 7:10 pm Post subject:

Here's a thread where another poster is researching the same thing: Cluster filesystem for HPC. Might give you a head start.

- John
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Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.