[mdlug] Samba and F5 for Failover?

[Carl T. Miller]

Wojtak, Greg wrote:
> Thanks for the insight.  Yeah, at this point I'm more concerned with just
> being *able* to bring everything back up and having as much of the data
> there as possible.  In the scenario I drew out, serverA and serverB are
> actually red hat cluster instances.  We've got samba failover *within* a
> site down pat.  Going from one data center to another, not so much.  One
> huge challenge I am facing is that the way our company's network is
> designed, our vlan's don't extend from one datacenter to another, and in
> fact cannot without a huge, massive overhaul.  <facepalm>  So a
> distributed cluster, or any other kind of transparent failover is out of
> the question... especially with samba.

In that case, I would look at bring up another server/cluster
at the DR site and leaving the samba service unstarted.  Copy
the config file from the original to the DR system and verify
that it works.  Then shut down samba and use rsync to copy over
the shared files.  Again, test and shut down samba.  If all is
well, it's just a matter of keeping the files in sync.

Depending on how much data changes, how often they need the
updates and how long it takes to synchronize, set up a cron job
to run rsync.

If you're working with lvm, you might be able to take a snapshot
of the filesystem and synchronize that.  Not sure how effective
that would be compared to a file level sync.

c