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Date:      Thu, 15 Oct 1998 17:15:03 -0400 (EDT)
From:      mike@seidata.com
To:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Mirrored Servers
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9810151659230.8109-100000@ns1.seidata.com>

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Hello,

Please excuse this message if it is not appropriate...

We run a small ISP with multiple FreeBSD servers providing all of our
services.  Four systems provide most of our essential services (such
as DNS, Mail, and Radius authenticaiton).

I'm wanting to come up with an effective way to 'mirror' drives across
servers.  The solution we should use, IMO, is RAID, but that's been
shot down...  so we're attempting to come up with an 'alternative'.

Let's say we have servers A, B, C and D on the same ethernet segment
like so:

	A---B---C---D

What I would like to do is place spare drives in each server...  So
each system would have the drive(s) it needs for normal operation,
plus a drive it isn't using...  Then A and B could cross-mirror and C
and D could do the same...  So if any drive fails, I just hotswap from
one server to the next (the idea being that if the mirror copy is
across the network on another server, there's less chance of 
controller-related corruption - which happened to us once before).

My question is, what's the best way to do something like this?  I've
thought about rdist, but have little-no experience in this area (I
guess I'll have to become an rdist guru over the weekend - we all know
the timeframes management gives us ;).

What I'm basically hoping for is a brainstorming session...  Either
suggestions of something other than rdist to use (and hopefully some
info about it) or effective ways to implement rdist.

Thanks in advance,

	-mike


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