[DRBD-user] DRBD SAMBA (again) and NFS

Diego Julian Remolina diego.remolina at ibb.gatech.edu
Thu Jun 1 13:49:02 CEST 2006

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


Hi,

I have been running a few NFS/Samba servers with DRBD and Heartbeat in production for over a year 
now and can tell you that MS Office applications will usually work correctly. However other 
applications such as Quickbooks and Revit will break in the event of a failover if you have the 
document opened.  I am not totally sure why this happens, but believe that it may be a matter of 
file locking and the locks being lost during the switchover. In the case of Revit, all users have 
been instructed to check out copies of the file to work on locally in their client machines and then 
check them in when they are done on the redundant server. This is a feature of Revit. In the case of 
Quickbooks, there is no work-around so far.

If anyone else has a better explanation or can think of a workaround, it will be greatly appreciated.

In the case of MS Word, for example if you are working on a file and the server switches over right 
when you are trying to save, the client computer locks up (MS Word hangs) for about 20 to 40 seconds 
and when the second server starts samba, then the client finishes the write and that's it.

Diego

Philippe Rousselot wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I want to make a samba HA system. The reason I do not use NFS  is the
> presence of a few windows machines in the network.
> 
> I spent some time reading the archives and I have a few points to
> clarify.
> 
> 
> There are no problems having a NFS HA system using DRBD and heartbeat,
> but samba not being state-less there maybe some error during the
> mirroring. 
> 
> This error can be overcome by retrying.
> 
> what do it mean ? 
> 
> someone save a file and it is not mirrored ?
> 
> but it will be at some point ?
> 
> do I need to survey the system and do something when there is an error
> or is there an automatic system that will solve the problem at some
> point ?
> 
> is this error visible directly from the client under windows ?
> 
> is it possible to have a system sharing NFS and Samba properties ? I
> have a folder and when I use a linux client I use samba ad when I use a
> windows client I use samba. as I have a NFS share, the problem is
> solved ?
> 
> sorry if these question seems trivial.
> 
> Thanks for you help
> 
> 
> Philippe
> 
> 
> 



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