All, When I began creating an active/passive samba server, I knew the session state information issue was going to make transparent fail-over unlikely. I figured minimal downtime was the best I could hope for. But I've been pleasantly surprised that it does in fact fail-over amazingly transparently.
I can have a file open from cifs01 on a network windows box, fail-over to cifs02, then modify the open file and save it with no issues at all. I never thought that would fly. I envisioned widoze locking up, or at least hour-glassing for 10 minutes before it would fail. Nothing. Silence. No pausing. It just worked. my setup: I needed a way to provide windows access to my compile cluster's gfs home data, so I setup a pair of VMs with samba and heartbeat. I wanted a single network name to hit, so I gave the VIP a dns name, and I'm using the same name as a NetBIOS alias on each server. The data being shared is nfs automounted from the cluster. I have not done any real demanding testing on this yet, but during normal usage at the windows side, file browsing and file operations all just seem to work as if one node never got powered off in the middle of doing it. Everything I have read about samba and HA made it seem like this was not possible. Are others doing this too? Can you think of some good tests to try to stress it (short of accessing a database or something). I imagine a fail-over during a large copy operation would fail, and I'll test that tomorrow. But for the moment, I'm just so psyched I had to tell somebody, and the dog couldn't care less. ;) Cheers, -C _______________________________________________ Linux-HA mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linux-ha.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-ha See also: http://linux-ha.org/ReportingProblems
