From owner-freebsd-cluster Mon Dec 9 15: 0:42 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 D3E8837B401 for ; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 15:00:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from grant.org (grant.org [206.190.164.98]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 50DE043EC5 for ; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 15:00:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mgrant@splat.grant.org) Received: from splat.grant.org (mgrant@splat.grant.org [213.39.2.177]) by grant.org (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id gB9N0XVM059755 for ; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 18:00:34 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from mgrant@splat.grant.org) Received: (from mgrant@localhost) by splat.grant.org (8.11.6+Sun/8.11.6) id gB9Mw5l08130; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 23:58:05 +0100 (MET) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 23:58:05 +0100 (MET) Message-Id: <200212092258.gB9Mw5l08130@splat.grant.org> From: Michael Grant To: freebsd-cluster@freebsd.org Subject: sharing files within a cluster 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 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. I looked into the Coda file system. It's beta code and fairly complicated to set up and it's unclear to me whether it will do what's necessary. Let's say I have 2 boxes sharing the load. Each box runs a mailer. A message could arrive at either box. How should these two mailers share a single user's mailbox? Similar problem with users who log in to their shell account, how can they get at their files from either box? Again, a similar problem with web stuff that accesses a database like an mldbm file. And for easier management, certain conf files are identical across the machines, when modified, the one on the other machine should also get modified. The password and aliases files comes to mind as examples, there are pleanty more. The more I think about this problem, the more I become convinced that there's definitely a need for some shared writable storage. But how? Michael Grant To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message