[DRBD-user] drbd and gfs

[Diego Julian Remolina]

Alexander Lind wrote:
> My portuguese is a little rusty (there does not seem to be an english 
> version), but I see that he uses drbd 0.8. That is the the caveat I 
> suppose, that it can be done with drbd 0.8.x, not 0.7.x, correct?

That is correct, 0.7.x does *not* support active/active

> 
> Do you have any idea of when a production-ready version of 0.8.x could 
> be expected?

The answer you will get for this one is:  When is ready!

> As far as the apps go, I was going to use the shared partitions for 
> network shares (file storage and propagation etc), and also Courier 
> Imapd. I don't forsee any problems with the files, and as far I have 
> understood, Courier Imapd with its maildirs (instead of spools) should 
> not have any problems either. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong :)

I think this should be ok, I do not use courier, but I assume that if you have postfix or sendmail 
as your MTA which runs independently on each machine and that delivers to courier on a separate 
socket file (or at least that is how cyrus imap works) on each machine then courier should be able 
to deliver mail to your shared active/active storage (maildir mailboxes).

I currently run in production sedmail+mimedefang+clamav+spamassain+cyrus-imap using drbd-0.7.21 on 
RHEL4 and that has worked perfectly for over a year (off course drbd has been updated over time). My 
web server uses drbd-0.7.21 and has a horde/imp installation for web mail. I could share my install 
notes on request (e-mail me off-list), but I have to warn you that they are not totally complete. I 
plan to turn them into a good howto when I upgrade my servers to RHEL5.

Diego

> 
> Thanks
> Alec
> 
> Diego Julian Remolina wrote:
> 
>> Yes that is possible, depending on the application you want to run. 
>> For example it may not be doable for e-mail unless the MTA you are 
>> using knows how to share a mail spool. As long as your application can 
>> work with two machines having access to the same files or folders then 
>> you should be ok. An alternative to GFS is ocfs2 which is also a 
>> clustered file system.  A guy from brazil wrote a howto for drbd and 
>> ocfs2 (it may only be in portuguesse, I am not sure if he has an 
>> english version):
>>
>> http://guialivre.governoeletronico.gov.br/seminario/index.php/DocumentacaoTecnologiasDRBDOCFS2#DRBD 
>>
>>
>> IMPORTANT: At this point, drbd-0.8.X is not stable and should not be 
>> used in production environments. Some people may already use it in 
>> production, but it is not recommended. If you do it, you may be 
>> risking too much.
>>
>> Diego
>>
>>
>> Alexander Lind wrote:
>>
>>> Hello All
>>>
>>> I have read that you can achieve a shared storage solution by 
>>> combining GFS and DRBD somehow.
>>> The idea being making it so i can have a shared and mirrored 
>>> partition on two separate machines connected via tcp/ip, that gives 
>>> each machine full r/w access.
>>> Is this possible? Is using GFS / DRBD the answer?  Are there better 
>>> solutions?
>>> Unfortunately I can't seem to find much info about this on the net, 
>>> so I'm hoping someone here can help me out! :)
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Alec
>>>
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>>
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