anyone using drbd succesfully? other mirroring options?

[Mark Roach <mrroach@okmaybe.com>]

I have been pounding my head against the wall (figuratively) trying to
get drbd working.

I have taken the kernel-source-2.4.18 and the upstream debian package
(version 0.6.2) and am trying to mirror 2 140G servers with little (no)
success. My systems connect fine and I get one of two outcomes

Either, during the sync process, one of the systems will disconnect and
hang with no syslog entries or after the sync process completes (after
17 hours), copying data to the master hangs the master.

I am not a newbie, and I think I have read up on the subject pretty
well, I have increased the tl-size parameter, asked questions on their
mailing list but still no luck. Everything I have read, and indeed the
nature of the software, seem to indicate that this should all Just Work.

So, my questions to you fine debian folk are, are any of you using this
product? Am I just missing something obvious? Arrggh! ok, that's not a
question. 

Does anyone have other favorite mirroring tools? I am very reluctant to
use rsync here because I want my servers synchronized as closely as
possible and rsync takes over an hour just to build the file list. I
have also looked at FAM/perl/python but it seems to choke on large
numbers of directories.

I appreciate any suggestions anyone can give me here, I am near my wit's
end.

-Mark