Re: redundant mail servers

[Michael Wood <mwood@its.uct.ac.za>]

Hi

On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 03:14:18PM +0100, Florian Friesdorf wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to setup a redundant mail system using exim with
> maildirs.  I thought I use two mail servers (one scsi
> controller each) and one scsi raid.
> 
> 1.    Server1 ---SCSI--- RAID5 ---SCSI--- Server2
> 
[snip]
> Is it possible (case 1) to mount one ext2 partition on two
> computers at the same time?

As Nicolas said you can't do that with ext2, but you can with
OpenGFS.  OpenGFS is still in development, though, so I don't
know how stable it is.  I have not used it.

You wouldn't be able to use RAID from both machines, though, so
it would have to be something like this:

Server1--[SCSI]--[disk with OpenGFS]--[SCSI]--Server2

Of course, if your disk dies you have no data...

> Is it possible (case 2) to run a software raid1 over two
> partitions (one on each raid5) from both computers at the same
> time?

As far as I know, no.  Linux software RAID was not designed to
be accessed from more than one machine.

hmmm... maybe you could do it with hardware RAID.

I hope that helps.

-- 
Michael Wood <mwood@its.uct.ac.za>