[mdlug] Samba and F5 for Failover?

[Robert Adkins]

Both Samba Servers can be named exactly the same and use all of the same
configuration files.

One server will lay dormant with a heartbeat monitor checking the status of
the second server and when that server fails, it would start up it's own
instance of smbd, nmbd and run with it.

I have no idea how you could overcome the few seconds between Samba dying
and the new Samba coming back up though.

I do know that you can NFS mount drives and then share those via Samba. You
could NFS share the smb configurations to ensure that they are the same on
both systems (or setup an rsync, which might be wiser) and have all the
shared data on a NAS that supports NFS and work out your shares via the
samba servers.

There's plenty of choices about how to make this all work.

Regards,
Rob

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org 
> [mailto:mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org] On Behalf Of Wojtak, Greg
> Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 9:20 AM
> To: MDLUG's Main discussion list
> Subject: [mdlug] Samba and F5 for Failover?
> 
> Say I have two samba servers, ServerA and ServerB.  In front 
> of those, I want to set up a failover mechanism  by 
> leveraging an F5.  The idea is that the data is that the data 
> is replicated with less than a 4ms lag between the two 
> servers (backend disk replication).  My question is, is there 
> anything special I need to do with Samba to get this to work? 
>  I want the F5 virtual name that users will hit to be, say, 
> "smb."  Would I then configure the samba servers' names to be 
> "smb" or would it be something else, like smbA and smbB?  Any 
> other considerations?
> 
> TIA
> 
> Greg Wojtak
> Unix Systems
> Quicken Loans
> O (734) 805-5980
> C (734) 718-8472
> http://www.quickenloans.com
> 
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