Hi List! I would like to replace a big NT-Server serving homedirectories only for about 150 Users (WinNT 4.0) with a pool of some Linux (Intel) machines running Samba. To increase performance i thought about using multiple machines (3-4) with DNS-load-balancing. The machine running the DNS will periodicly check all mirrors and remove them from the IP-chain if malfunctioning. Clients will not notify that the IP-address of a broken machine has changed. Only changes on open file may be lost but the user can continue to work. So far so good, but how do I set up these machines to write changes on there local drive to their mirrors via NFS (or something else). The problem is that there is no master-disk. The problem could be solved with making Samba copy each write access to multiple directories - but that would cause heavy code modification. I would have to replace all file operations with my clones. Performance may be increased if the mirroring is done with seperate network devices. Is there a simpler attempt - RAID over NBD (network block devices - new in Kernel 2.2)? Could a BeoWolf-Cluster be a solution? I heard that AFS could do something like that but there is no free stable server for Linux. I'm sure there are more people interested in such kind of solution: Replacing expensive high performance servers with multiple cheap servers without RAIDs and gain redundancy and increased performance. Thanks in advance. Leif Jakob -- ################################################################ # FAX/Voice : +49-251-211236 | Admin of www.weite-welt.com # # To get my PGP-Key send | # # message with subject : | Visit my private homepage: # # GETPGPKEY | http://www.jakob.weite-welt.com # ################################################################ This mail was composed on a 100% M$ free system - Linux rules.
On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Leif Jakob wrote:> I would like to replace a big NT-Server serving homedirectories > only for about 150 Users (WinNT 4.0) with a pool of some > Linux (Intel) machines running Samba.Is there a reason that a single Linux machine isn't an option?> Is there a simpler attempt - RAID over NBD (network block devices > - new in Kernel 2.2)? Could a BeoWolf-Cluster be a solution? I > heard that AFS could do something like that but there is no > free stable server for Linux.It rather depends. The samba team know the stability of the various bits of code better than I do, but my instinct would be to have a single machine serving as a PDC with the HEAD CVS branch (only really doing authentication with SMB) and serving files via several front-end boxes which mount the server's filespace via Coda (which can do persistent caching) which re-export the files via the stable code with security=server. The load-balancing thing may be harder - I don't know how much client-side WINS caching Windows does... Unless you really need to scale big, I can't really imagine a better solution than a big, beefy Linux (Sun, SGI) box with some RAID, though. Matthew.