Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 09:26:48 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Guy Van Sanden <n.b@myrealbox.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NFS server redundancy/failover Message-ID: <3F783318.6020207@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <1064831072.3638.7.camel@cronos.home.vsb> References: <1064831072.3638.7.camel@cronos.home.vsb>
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Guy Van Sanden wrote:
[ ... ]
> Does anyone know if and how it is possible to set up a redundant NFS server?
Yes, although true redundancy for NFS is available only for read-only shares.
From "man mount_nfs" under Solaris:
Replicated file systems and failover
resource can list multiple read-only file systems to
be used to provide data. These file systems should
contain equivalent directory structures and identical
files. It is also recommended that they be created by
a utility such as rdist(1). The file systems may be
specified either with a comma-separated list of
host:/pathname entries and/or NFS URL entries, or with
a comma -separated list of hosts, if all file system
names are the same. If multiple file systems are named
and the first server in the list is down, failover
will use the next alternate server to access files.
If the read-only option is not chosen, replication
will be disabled. File access will block on the ori-
ginal if NFS locks are active for that file.
> What I want to do is this, I have a primary NFS server that serves home directories and data storage.
> I also have a second system with a lot of disk-capacity, I could set it up as a 'mirror' using rsync.
> Now, when the primary NFS goes down, clients should automaticly look for the backup one.
If the data is read-write, and you need fileserver redundancy, NFS is not
adequate: you should consider AFS/DFS instead, although I've heard rumors that
the OpenAFS (Arla?) software is somewhat broken on FreeBSD at this point.
--
-Chuck
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