Free BSD & Heartbeat + Samba + Rsync

[Robert Slade]

Hi,

I'm new to the world of HA and Unix having just moved from a windows
based system.

What I am trying to do is provide a network of XP, W2k and FreeBSD (5.3)
machines a central File store. This store also needs to provide for
backing up of off site machines. My problem is that I am not up
onprogramming and I am having problems getting my brain around scripts
etc.

My thoughts are:

Use heartbeat to form the core of the system.

Use Samba to export file shares for the Windows machines.

Use Rsync to sync the files between nodes of the cluster.

Use FTP (VSftp or ProFTP) to receive backups of the data from the off
site machines?

I have got the bits running on their own, but i am having trouble with
getting them to run together. If I have this right, heartbeat will stop
and start services such as samba as the nodes change over.

Heartbeat works fine and the cluster (ip 192.168.0.60 name cluster)
appears on the network. The first problem is that samba needs to be
started and stopped on the nodes. On FreeBSD Samba is started by running
smbd and nmbd via inetd unless I missed something. According to the HB
docs, to start/stop it needs a script so that a smb start or similar
will work. I'm not sure how to do this. 

My second problem is that I can get rsync to work ok, but I need to get
it to work in the reverse direction once the heartbeat has operated and
the failed node bought backup. I've tried to use the Perl scripts that
came with HB but failed as they are for linux rather than BSD and I do
not know enough about Perl to fix this. Whilst the the different paths
are easily sorted there are calls to utils that are not found on BSD. I
can post the scripts it that would help.

Advice on the feasibility of this setup would be appreciated as would
help with sorting out the problems above

Thanks

Rob

(sorry about the long post)