From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon May 31 09:56:54 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1EC1616A4CF for ; Mon, 31 May 2004 09:56:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out004.verizon.net (out004pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.142]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC3B543D48 for ; Mon, 31 May 2004 09:56:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.3] ([68.161.84.3]) by out004.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040531165518.TSHN1551.out004.verizon.net@[192.168.1.3]>; Mon, 31 May 2004 11:55:18 -0500 Message-ID: <40BB6376.8030704@mac.com> Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 12:55:18 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: adp References: <011401c446ae$3aa4cff0$6501a8c0@yourqqh4336axf> In-Reply-To: <011401c446ae$3aa4cff0$6501a8c0@yourqqh4336axf> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out004.verizon.net from [68.161.84.3] at Mon, 31 May 2004 11:55:18 -0500 cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NFS server fail-over - how do you do it? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 16:56:54 -0000 adp wrote: > One of my big problems right now is that if our primary NFS server goes down > then everything using that NFS mount locks up. If I change to the mounted > filesystem on the client then it stalls: > > # pwd > /root > # cd /nfs-mount-dir > [locks] > > If I try to reboot the reboot fails as well since FreeBSD can't unmount the > filesystem!? Solaris provides mechanisms for NFS-failover for read-only NFS shares, but FreeBSD doesn't seem to support that. Besides, most people seem to want to use read/write filesystems, which makes the former solution not very useful to most people's requirements. The solution to the problem is to make very certain that your primary NFS server does not go down, ever, period. Reasonable people who identify a mission-critical system such as a primary NFS server ought to be willing to spend money to get really good hardware, have a UPS, and so forth to facility the goal of 100% uptime. A Sun E450 still makes a nice primary fileserver, although NAS solutions like a NetApp or an Auspex (not cheap!) should also be considered. The other choice would be to switch from using NFS to using a distributed filesystem which implements fileserver redundancy, such as AFS and it's successor, DFS. -- -Chuck