[DRBD-user] Mount filesystem on both servers?

Gordan Bobic drbd at bobich.net
Thu Jan 22 15:56:21 CET 2009

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


On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:17:44 +0100, Peter Funk <pf at artcom-gmbh.de> wrote:

> Hmmm... What about file-locking?  
> 
> Normally a rpc.statd is required for this to work, which for example on
> Ubuntu Linux is started as part of the package/service nfs-common.  
> Since rpc.statd will be started by /etc/init.d/nfs-common it is needed 
> ---as the name `common` already suggests--- on both the NFS server and 
> NFS client sides.
> 
> Unfortunately /var/lib/nfs which is in turn needed by rpc.statd to start 
> up has to be kept on the shared DRBD to avoid stale nfs file locks
> on any clients after a failover switch.

So set up both nfs/nfslock as fail-over resources in addition to your data
volume and /var/lib/nfs volume which should also be on a DRBD volume.

> Conclusion:
> Together with heartbeat it is not that simple to exchange the roles
> of the NFS server and the NFS client between two nodes back and fourth.

Not really, you just need additional fail-over resources/services. Instead
of just failing over the IP address you make it start up the relevant
services and data volumes on the secondary server. Personally I prefer a
fully active-active setup if I can at all help it, but the active/passive
setup should be possible, too. You mostly answered your own question, in
fact, re: /var/lib/nfs.

> At least as I insisted on using heartbeat r1 style config files because
> I wanted to avoid the fancy and IMHO rather complex XML cluster resource 
> manager files introduced with heartbeat 2.x I ran into severe problems
> and had to give up for the time being.

I tend to use RHCS in preference to heartbeat, but that's mostly because I
tend to use GFS on most of my clustered systems, so RHCS is mandatory, and
heartbeat would just be redundant and mean maintaining two configs instead
of one.

Gordan



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