From owner-freebsd-cluster Mon Dec 9 16:18:25 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-cluster@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 276B637B401 for ; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:18:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from fubar.adept.org (fubar.adept.org [63.147.172.249]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CC5B243ED4 for ; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:18:23 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@adept.org) Received: by fubar.adept.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 1858715247; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:15:19 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fubar.adept.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 160BB15213 for ; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:15:19 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:15:19 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Hoskins To: freebsd-cluster@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sharing files within a cluster In-Reply-To: <20021209234428.GE98967@roughtrade.net> Message-ID: <20021209160251.E10322-100000@fubar.adept.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-cluster@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Joshua Goodall wrote: > On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 11:58:05PM +0100, Michael Grant wrote: > > I'm still stymied by the problem of how to share files across > > machines without having a third (and forth!) machine acting as a > > disk server. > Conceptually, if you have two machines, they could act as servers > for each other. Some would argue that having a single fileserver, with RAID, and one set of RAID config files, etc. to maintain... Could be a good thing. Of course it depends on your requirements. Some complexity could be mitigated with configuration management. (And, agreeably, any significantly sized cluster will likely have working config mgmt.) However, both software and hardware RAID have came far, and with filers like Netapp's, keeping individual nodes as minimal as possible (flash disks?) may be a good thing in larger environments. (Thinking large amounts of data, ala snap-mirror for backups/DR.) > There are some nasty failure modes associated with doing this, > epecially if you sharing via NFS. Coda offers a more disconnected > consistency model that should alleviate that somewhat. It may be > beta code, but Coda itself is in production use at some large sites. Does anyone have non-NDA-protected sketches/diagrams/notes/etc. of working (or not!) FreeBSD clusters they'd care to share? I'm just starting to experiment myself, and it would be good to form a sort of roadmap of "what's worked" and "what hasn't." > You are wanting a single-system-image cluster. Not many *nix vendors > have got this right (Tru64 quite highly rated in this regard) and none > of the free Unices AFAIK. Sounds like we need to bribe some Tru64 folks. ;) -- Mike Hoskins This message is RFC 1855 compliant, mike@adept.org www.adept.org/~mike/pub/rfcs/rfc1855.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message