From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Sep 29 06:26:56 2003 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 8637B16A4B3 for ; Mon, 29 Sep 2003 06:26:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out001.verizon.net (out001pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.140]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 69D8D44022 for ; Mon, 29 Sep 2003 06:26:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([68.237.14.199]) by out001.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.33 201-253-122-126-133-20030313) with ESMTP id <20030929132652.CONL5382.out001.verizon.net@mac.com>; Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:26:52 -0500 Message-ID: <3F783318.6020207@mac.com> Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 09:26:48 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030925 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Guy Van Sanden References: <1064831072.3638.7.camel@cronos.home.vsb> In-Reply-To: <1064831072.3638.7.camel@cronos.home.vsb> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out001.verizon.net from [68.237.14.199] at Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:26:52 -0500 cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NFS server redundancy/failover 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, 29 Sep 2003 13:26:56 -0000 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