[DRBD-user] Re: loop device and eth0 loop-back + latest version

Greg Freemyer freemyer-ml at NorcrossGroup.com
Fri Apr 23 21:47:30 CEST 2004

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 13:55, Nuno Tavares wrote:
> I'm confused.
> 
> Do you think OpenGFS is a solution to my problem?

First OpenGFS and GFS are 2 different things.  (That may be why you were
confused.)

OpenGFS is GPL'd and primarily being worked on by 2 Intel engineers at
present.

GFS is not GPL'd too my knowledge (but it is supposed at some point). It
is produced by Sistina, which is owned by Redhat.

In the absence of machine failures, both will do what you want.

In the presence of failures, OpenGFS will not presently survive crashing
of the computer running its lockserver.  It is working on fixing that,
but you are in a hurry.

I don't know how fault-tolerant GFS is.

BTW: 
The functionality you are requesting is very leading edge in Linux, so
if I were you I would focus on writing up a comprehensive set of
requirements, then posting to see if there is anything out there that
meets your needs.  In your write-up, be sure to include locking,
performance, fault-tolerance, number of nodes, and GPL vs. commercial
solutions acceptable.  (There are at least 5 GPL solutions and 2
commercial offerings I know of that meet your basic need, but they all
have short-comings.  The biggest issue is fault-tolerance.)

Possible GPL packages:

OpenGFS 
	(lockserver not fault tolerant)
OpenSSI's CFS 
	(They have some fault-tolerance, but I believe not full.)
Luster 
	(Good faul-tolerance I believe, but designed for large numbers of
computers)
Intermezzo 
	(I don't know anything about it.)
OCFS 
	(Oracle Cluster Filesystem.  I don't know anything about it.)

Commercial:
GFS
??? (Another one I can't think of.)

And why is it that NFS and/or SMB are unacceptable?  They are the
standard way to do this.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer




More information about the drbd-user mailing list