Guys, Need to seek your advice again, currently our organisation have 26 Samba PDC and slave LDAP across areas as Domain Controller and one master LDAP server at our NOC. Whatever changes made in master LDAP will replicate down to this 26 servers and vice versa, changes made in one of these servers will also refer back to master LDAP and master LDAP will replicate down to the rest. We intend to implement the centralise storage at NOC level and make this storage accessible by end users' workstation from 26 areas. Currently we have logon script to map local samba shared drive as windows drive, what we wanted to achieve is to map the centralise storage as windows drive. The problem here is our current network setup is not allowed netbios (samba) traffic between the different segment, meaning to say user from area A won't be able to map samba shared at area B, etc. Our solution is to implement NFS by installing NFS server at NOC storage server and samba server at 26 areas act as NFS client to mount the NOC storage, then share out the NFS mount point from local Samba so the end user will see another windows drive and instead accessing NOC storage directly, they actually access it via local samba server. Our only concern is the performance issues (not tested yet) because the current WAN link is only 2Mbps and our other services also tap on this bandwidth as well. Do you guys have any idea or suggestion to solve this situation using other approach instead of NFS? We were thinking of AFS, Coda but not sure how they perform compare to NFS. I know that AFS is commonly use by university in USA but again I need your input on this. Thanks. Regards, Vibranze
Before I wrote the NFS-DRBD tutorial ( http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_nfs_drbd_heartbeat ), I did some research about cluster file systems and related solutoins. I didn't try them, but I can give you some links: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://inter-mezzo.org/ http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4368/8/ http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/gfs/ http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ http://linux-ha.org/RelatedTechnologies/Filesystems
Thanks Falko for the useful links. Finally, management decided to use NFS to provide the centralise file storage. Regards, Vibranze
