Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
Hello, I'm in the process of building a fault tolerant system, and have looked at drbd and the recent GFS release by redhat. What I ideally would like to have is 1. one filesystem shared among a number of nodes, with write access at all nodes. "shared storage" (shared scsi) would introduce a single point of failure, so I'm thinking more in the lines of storage replication, i.e. what drbd is doing. 2. arbitrary node(s) may fail, and be resynchronized after repair 3. good performance Now, as I understand drbd works only in a primary/secondary configuration, where all writes at paul/primary is replicated to silas/secondary, and their roles can switch with heartbeat software. The two node configuration may be sufficient for our needs, but it would be a nice bonus to be able to mount the file system from three, four nodes. Will perhaps GNBD (gfs network block device) solve this instead of using drbd? (but, as far as I can tell, it will only have one primary and is mainly for load balancing and not fault tolerance) Would it be possible to use GFS on top of DRBD to get write support at both nodes? I.e. does drbd replicate writes at silas to paul? Another acceptable solution would be to use for example ext3 on the drbd replicated block device. Now, I've understood that it is not adviced to mount the filesystems at the secondary node because the FS will change under its feed because it is not aware of another host writing. My question is, would it be possible to mount the filesystem readonly at silas? This would ease the burden of backup on the primary node as they instead could be done on the secondary node. Thoughts? Regards, Stefan