Options for synchronising filesystems

[Oliver Fromme]

Isaac Levy <ike at lesmuug.org> wrote:
 > In effect, a terse example of how someone could use the Geom tools I  
 > mentioned, to meet this requirement:
 > 
 > + Setup mirrored disks across machines as discussed before
 > 
 > + Mount a slice of that disk Read/Write on one machine (acting as  
 > master)
 > + Mount that same slice Readonly on both machines, using Geom Gate,  
 > and serve data from there.

That doesn't work.  You would need a cache coherency proto-
coll for that setup to work correctly.  Or mount it read-
only _everywhere_ (including the master).  If you have to
perform updates, you would have to perform this sequence:

   1. remount the master read-write,
   2. do the updates,
   3. remount the master read-only,
   4. flush the caches on the slaves (umount; mount).

But that means you'll have a short downtime each time you
update things -- probably not what you want, especially if
a redundant setup is the goal.

Currently, the _only_ way to mount the same filesystem on
multiple FreeBSD systems is NFS (or third-party software
like CODA).  Another alternative, as others have mentioned,
is to duplicate or synchronize the filesystems on each
server regularly (rsync, unison, whatever).

 > Eric, you are definately correct, that there's not really a disk- 
 > level mechanism to maintain concurrent writes between volumes mounted  
 > across servers using FreeBSD

Not even concurrent reads and write (i.e. one host writes
and the others read).  See above.

 > (excepting NFS, which in this context, makes me say *yuck*).

NFS certainly has its disadvantages, but works pretty well
when set up in a reasonable way.

 > I guess I'm saying this is a big-picture computing problem IMHO, and  
 > I don't know of a good solution here (though I'm curious about what  
 > kind of work has been done in Dragonfly which is relevant?)

So far, DragonFly BSD hasn't done anything regarding cache-
coherency for clusters, though it is planned for the future,
I think.  So, as of today, DF doesn't provide a solution for
the above problem either.

However, Matt Dillon has worked on a journalling feature
for UFS which might be helpful for the situation given by
the OP.  Not everything is implemented yet, but it _is_
already usable to maintain remote mirrors.  On July 5th,
Matt wrote:  "I can now run a buildworld loop, and the
mirror generated by the journal stays in synch (diff -r
reports no differences if I idle the buildworld, wait a
second or two for the journal to catch up, and run it)."

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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