[DRBD-user] Newbie confusion

Etienne van Tonder evt at infoware.com.au
Wed Oct 5 11:51:08 CEST 2005

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


I've spent most of today reading the archives and many articles on DRBD, I
have a few questions if I may. I have an existing system running Suse9 pro
with RAID1, I've bought an exact same server and would like to set them up
running hearbeat and DRBD.

1. I presume I have to setup DRBD first and then Heartbeat.

2. I'm a bit confused, when I think of RAID1 I think of a complete disk
being mirrored. Is this not the case with DRBD? From what I have read it
seems like it really only mirrors a single partition, is this correct? If so
what about the system files, if I make a change to a config file on the
primary, this change will not be mirrored to the secondary automatically?

3. The current server has the following partitions:
Total disk size sda1 73GB
FAT16 62.7MB sda1
L-Swap2 1GB sda2
ReiserFS 67.2GB sd3
Free 7.8MB
Am I able reconfigure the system to use DRBD, I'm currently only using about
3GB on sd3 so I could possibly shrink the partition and create a new
partition if required.

4. If I can not mirror the complete disk, what do I do with the data that
I'd like to mirror that currently exists on sda3. In particular I have a
posgresql database, php files that I change from time to time, and any other
files that I need to mirror. Do I have to copy these files to the DRBD
partition and change all the configs for these systems to point to the new
location?

5. Ideally I would have liked a system where all changes including updates
to packages, config files, data, etc. get mirrored by DRBD, if this is not
possible how do people prevent the secondary getting out of sync with
updates. If the primary fails and the secondary takes over it could be out
of date.

Thanks in advance,

Etienne.





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