[DRBD-user] Understanding DRBD and OCFS relation ship

Jeff Buck jeffb at umci.com
Thu Feb 22 19:09:19 CET 2007

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


I'm not don't know all the details all that well, but the short version
is basically this:

Most filesystems expect to be completely in charge of their block device
when they have it mounted. If something else modifies the block device
that they have mounted, you can expect complete mayhem. The filesystem
will likely go into a faulty disk/corrupt filesystem mode where it goes
read only so no more damage can be done to the disk. It might just crash
itself, or the entire box outright.

OCFS2 (and gfs) are designed to share a block device with other copies
of itself running on other systems.  Because they're designed with this
in mind, they can prevent the mayhem by using locking mechanisms to make
sure both machines don't try to mess with the same data at the same
time. They can also modify they way they do caching so that they don't
make assumptions about what they would have found on the disk, since it
may have been changed by another machine.



On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 12:46 -0500, David wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to create a setup where I can read/write to the master node 
> by samba and read-only, again by samba, from the slave at the same 
> time.  From what I understand I need to use a shared file system and 8.0 
> for this.  What I'm not clear on is why I need to use this combination. 
> Is it because other journaled file systems (xfs, reiserfs, etc) cannot 
> handle drbd updating the underlying data?  Also, why is it the 
> drbd/ocfs2 (for example) combo works? 
> 
> If there are already docs explaining all this, please feel free to just 
> fire off the links to me.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> David Filion
> 
> _______________________________________________
> drbd-user mailing list
> drbd-user at lists.linbit.com
> http://lists.linbit.com/mailman/listinfo/drbd-user




More information about the drbd-user mailing list