[DRBD-user] How Long Can a Primary Stay Disconnected from a Secondary?

Digimer linux at alteeve.com
Thu Mar 3 18:20:56 CET 2011

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


On 03/03/2011 12:09 PM, Florian Haas wrote:
> On 2011-03-03 16:13, Digimer wrote:
>> On 03/03/2011 10:05 AM, Robinson, Eric wrote:
>>> I am thinking about taking a secondary node offline for maintenance
>>> during production hours. I assume it cannot stay offline forever because
>>> eventually the primary would run out of space to record changes that
>>> need to be sync'd. Is there a way to know in advance how long it is safe
>>> to stay disconnected without resync'ing?
>>
>> As I understand it, dirty blocks are recorded in memory. I am sure there
>> is an upper limit to the counters, but I would hazard a guess that you
>> would run out of RAM first.
> 
> Gaaah, we'd never be crash safe if we recorded this in memory only. One
> node fails, we track the sync, the other node fails, boom the sync
> information is gone. No, DRBD is a wee bit smarter than that. :)
> 
> You can overwrite your whole device while disconnected. DRBD will simply
> eventually have flipped all the bits in the bitmap. Which it keeps on
> stable storage, obviously.
> 
> Florian

Today I learned...

I swear that I read that dirty blocks were kept in memory somewhere...
Was this perhaps true some time in the past, or did I have a very vivid
and inaccurate daydream at some point?

:P

-- 
Digimer
E-Mail: digimer at alteeve.com
AN!Whitepapers: http://alteeve.com
Node Assassin:  http://nodeassassin.org



More information about the drbd-user mailing list