SW-RAID List,
This is slightly off-topic. No, in fact it might be further than just
"slightly". I have been exploring redundant network filesystems for
Linux, off and on for the past several months. I need something that
will replicate a fs across a lan, much the same way RAID-1 duplicates
fs's. The purpose is for a high-availability system, where several
nodes participate to keep a set of services active indefinitely. My
company uses a SCO solution, called "Sentinel", which is just a
single-master/single-slave arrangement that duplicates disks between two
machines. When the master node goes down, the other assumes its IP, and
has an identical filesystem as the dead machine. When the master comes
back up, it resyncs to the master and assumes the slave position again.
But we want to dump SCO and go entirely with Linux, and have the same
functionality.
I have already explored Coda, InterMezzo, and the Linux-HA website
(http://www.henge.com/~alanr/ha). So far, the HA site only has the IP
assumption source, and links to other sites I've already taken a look
at, none of which contain what I think is necessary for a redundant
network filesystem. Coda and InterMezzo seem more like "caching"
solutions, for mobile or remote computing, not as a *redundant*,
fully-duplicated filesystem. I attended a seminar at LinuxExpo in
Raleigh, NC on GFS, but that looked like something still in its infancy,
and relying somewhat heavily upon certain SCSI and Fiber-Channel
features. I want something that anyone with >1 machine and any
linux-supported disk media can use as RAID-1 data duplication.
After considering the RAID-1 code that has come to (relative) maturity
here, it seems like a good code base to get started on a networked
RAID-1-type system. Basically, rather than sync-ing between two
physically local disks, modify the code to sync between a local and a
remote (or more than one remote) disk. Maybe I've missed something
about Coda, GFS, or Intermezzo, or maybe there's an entirely different
system that already does exactly what I want (as open-source, of
course). But if not, is there anyone else on this list who is
interested in venturing out into this arena?
Thanks,
Tom
--
Tom Kunz Tool Developer Software Consulting Services
PGP Key http://www.users.fast.net/~tkunz/pgp.html
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