Re: Active Software-based file replication

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 09:35:05AM +0100, victor.rodriguez@valmesa.es wrote:
> If you just want to replicate data, I think that DRBD.org it's a good
> option. But keep in mind that you'll have one server with a bunch
> of disks doing nothing but replicating data, unless you use it for
> something else unrelated to the data that you're replicating. Think of
> it as RAID1 over the network. You can even set it up with "heartbeat"
> to make it high available in an active-passive configuration. It
> worked flawlessly for me in an OTRS installation, replicating config
> files, runtime files and the Database.

yes, this is exactly what DRBD is for, and the automatic failover is exactly
what you need on a replicated file server.

btw, the author of DRBD also says:

   "Currently DRBD grants read-write access only to one node at a time,
    which is sufficient for the usual fail-over HA cluster. Although it
    is currently not on my task list, it would not be a great effort to
    allow both nodes read-write access. This would be useful with GFS
    for example."

if this ever gets done, it would allow load-balancing as well as failover.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)