[H-GEN] any ideas for cluster filesystem solution ?

[David Jericho]

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On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 02:04:49PM +1000, Craig ARMOUR wrote:
> as eric said to start off with, he has two machines with one external raid
> arrray, and he wishes to get the best HA he can with what he
> has.  unfortunately, it appears linux does not support the SAN stuff well,
> other wise just sticking both machines on the fcal arbitrated loop would
> work well.  ( Solaris does it easily ! :) 

Well, given that at the fastest, a Cisco 6500 has about a 3 second failover, 
many HA products having worse fail over times, the original suggestion of 
just remounting the html document drive might be useful anyway, the only real
risk is running on a drive with munged superblock. 

The html docs directories and the cgi-bin directories should always be mounted 
read only anyway, there is no reason to have any level of write access there.

You're left with a logs directory, and maybe a temporary spool for some reason.

Maybe investigating something like reiserfs or your favourite journalling 
file system may reduce the chances of a munged file system upon the remount.

If you can flood a single PIII with web requests anyway, I think you could
afford more than that setup, so Linux Virtual Server with a heartbeat and some 
scripts to deal with the master/slave dying or coming back would be the best 
bet.

High Avaliablity is one of these areas where you can constantly go "what if"
and come up with a solution to overcome it.

Boeing and their flight control systems, you have x number of solutions, 
written to the same spec, by x number of vendors, on x number of platforms, 
in x number of languages. And still sometimes they have all bar 1 system 
go down. Once you get to that level, I think you have to start arguing 
statistically about your solutions.

-- 
David Jericho, Systems Administrator
WebMatchIT Interactive Marketing

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