fbsd & fibre channel & SANs

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> In the last episode (Sep 17), Eric said:
> > I'm trying set up a cluster of freebsd fileservers sharing a common
> > set of volumes/drives/raids over netatalk to a bunch of OS 9 clients.
> > Each fileserver has a Qlogic 2100 fibre channel card connected to a
> > switch. Also connected to the switch are several fibre channel raid
> > controllers, with raids attached to them. I have no problem mount and
> > using the raid volumes on the freebsd servers.
> > 
> > What I'd really like to do is mount the same volume on two or more
> > servers, which I can do, but one server does not know about the other
> > server's changes to the disk. I'm sure this results in files being
> > overwritten since each server thinks it owns the disk. I'm sure
> > things like softupdates compund my problem even more.
> 
> You would need a shared storage filesystem; GFS is the only one I know
> of, and that's Linux-only.

> > Is there a way to have two machines share a disk, and communicate
> > between them (over the network?) the changes? I've seen AFS, and it's
> > mostly what i'm trying to do, but it doesn't work with OS 9 clients.
> > I want an OS 9 client to be able to pick a server in the cluster
> > (from their chooser) and be presented with the same shared volumes,
> > regardless of the chosen server. Any help??
> 
> AFS looks like it replicates files onto multiple servers, so if one
> goes down the data is still available somewhere else.  The servers do
> not share backend filesystems.

Don't you just wish OpenAFS for FreeBSD (and some of the others) was 
finished and ready to go.  That would be so wonderful.

////jerry

>...
> 
> -- 
> 	Dan Nelson
> 	dnelson at allantgroup.com