Need your advise.

[Chuck Swiger]

Robert Slade wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 20:39, Charles Swiger wrote:
[ ... ]
>> Hmm.  The answer is probably no, FreeBSD doesn't have anything which  
>> handles NFS or Samba failover transparently.
> 
> Chuck,
> 
> Sorry to disagree. There is a port of Heartbeat to free BSD, (it is in
> the ports). It does handle NFS and Samba failover transparently. In fact
> it will handle almost anything that you can start and stop via a script.

I don't mind the disagreement: if the heartbeat port solves this problem, good 
for it.  But by the same token, there are lots of third-party hardware 
loadbalancers and transaction servers and whatnot which use some variant on 
proxy-ARPing and can turn FreeBSD clients into what people call a cluster.

The thing is, you end up having to implement your own syncronization scripts, 
pretty much on a per-service basis.  It's real easy to end up with conflicting 
filesystems when a failure happens.  So it's not quite the same thing as having 
the clustering capability built into the base system, and having the system 
/etc/rc scripts already HA/cluster-aware.

Then again, lots of cluster products which are integrated into the OS, such as 
Microsoft's cluster solution, or Apple's XSAN, or probably even RedHat's HA 
cluster product, don't really deal with syncronization transparently, either-- 
they all seem to want a reliable NAS storage behind the scenes, or a metadata 
controller, or who-knows-what (respectively :-).  Lots of people buy two 
machines, and the Microsoft cluster product, and are real suprised to learn 
that that isn't enough to have a working cluster.

-- 
-Chuck