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Re: Request for Sponser: The Global File System



On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 07:38:41PM +0800, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously lewis@sistina.com wrote:
> > Some of the other guys are using a PC with the GNBD (our network
> > block device) server, serving out a block device to a couple of laptops.
> 
> I was wondering about that.. why did you write another nbd? If I
> remember correctly there already was one out there.

Well...standard NBDs don't work well with multiple machines AFAIK.

> > Again, performance is not great (due to slow PCMCIA NICs, but it works.  Of
> > course, ideally you want a fast Fibre Channel array and several computers with
> > Fibre Channel cards, and some of the testing is done with this, but I
> > generally don't need that kind of test setup.
> 
> This should also work with shared SCSI storage, right? That's a lot
> cheaper to setup if people want to play with it (and very nice for
> things like failover setups where you only need 2 nodes).

It will, but you probably don't want to do this unless your storage is
dual-port.  You can try it with a single port storage device, but you will
want to test that you can have simultaneous reads/writes and make sure that
you can have I/O from one machine and power cycle the other without
interrupting the first machine's I/O.  In my experience, with single port
storage this does not work.  There is no reason that it should not work, but
I'm guessing the SCSI venders are not building the hardware to support this.
Let me know if you get any single port setups working though.

Regards,
-- 
AJ Lewis
Sistina Software Inc.                  Voice:  612-379-3951
1313 5th St SE, Suite 111              Fax:    612-379-3952
Minneapolis, MN 55414                  E-Mail: lewis@sistina.com
http://www.sistina.com

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