Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:10:14 +0200 From: Attila Nagy <bra@fsn.hu> To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Redundant/failover NFS servers - stale NFS file handle Message-ID: <44E07636.4090403@fsn.hu>
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Hello, I would like to run diskless clients (they are actually servers) from FreeBSD, but I don't like having a SPoF at the NFS server level and don't want to use expensive out of the box solutions, like a NAS with a SAN behind it. The scenario of one master server and one (or more) slave(s) are enough for me, as the mounts would be read only. So in theory, having two FreeBSD boxes, both with the NFS service on a CARP-based virtual IP would perfectly fit my needs. The only problem is that NFS encodes some information in the filehandles, so when I'm doing a failover with the NFS clients (bringing the carp interface down on the master server), I get "Stale NFS file handle". Linux has an fsid option, which can be specified in exports, but as far as I can understand what's going under the hood it's only part of the problem. Due to inode numbers (and maybe other reasons) I need to have a common, shared file system between the NFS servers to have file handles in sync. Do you see any possible solutions, which could satisfy this (thought to be) simple need of having a master and slave NFS servers with a virtual IP without client side support? As for the client side, Solaris has the capability of doing NFS client failover (reported to have some problems, but for now I would have only FreeBSD clients), and AMD has multiple server support, but I don't know how does that work with FreeBSD diskless boots yet. (root FS on NFS) Thanks, -- Attila Nagy e-mail: Attila.Nagy@fsn.hu Free Software Network (FSN.HU) phone: +3630 306 6758 http://www.fsn.hu/
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