Hi folks, I'm was playing around with the possibility of using
some kind of NFS based system to do server clustering
for load balancing and high availability. I came across
an alternate solution called global file system (GFS).
It's a file system that can be put onto a network block
device and exported to clients as a local device
(like NFS).
To quote their web site (http://www.sistina.com):
"The Global File System (GFS) is a shared storage device, cluster file
system for Linux.
GFS supports multi-client journaling and rapid recovery from client
failures.
Nodes within a GFS cluster physically share the same storage by means of
Fibre
Channel (FC), shared SCSI devices, or network block devices.
The file system appears to be local on each node and GFS synchronizes
file access
across the cluster. GFS is fully symmetric. In other words,
all nodes are equal and there is no server which could be either a
bottleneck or a
single point of failure. GFS uses read and write caching while
maintaining full UNIX file system semantics."
I'd like to get a bit of advice on this one. I know that NFS
is a big no-no when using qmail due to the way it handles the
queue. I also know that qmail may have trouble with certain
journaling filesystems (for example, reiserfs) because qmail
assumes that link() and unlink() are syncronous operations
(according to the reiserfs FAQ).
So my question boils down to, has anyone ever tried using
qmail and GFS? I've been following the mailing list for a
while now, without any mention of it.
In the short term, my plan would be to setup one machine
to act as a fileserver using the gndb facilities of
GFS, and eventually switch to fiberchannel shared storage.
Regards
Mark Steele
VP research and development
Inet Technologies Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
