« "Page not found" : a monologue | Main | Power cut ... »
September 22, 2003
OpenGFS and High Availability : the continuing story
If you've bothered to read any of this errant tosh over the last two weeks, you'll have figured out that I'm trying to do something tricksy with Linux.
Yup.
I'm trying to build a clustered file server, based around a dual hosted 1.1Tb SCSI RAID box. I want to use OpenGFS and RedHat 9.0 to do this. The problem I've had is that the RH 9.0 kernel is patched by RedHat themselves, but the OpenGFS patches expect to be applied to a vanilla kernel.
I've asked around in comp.os.linux.redhat, also Brian Jackson of the OpenGFS project. The advice was to give the RH 9.0 kernel the elbow and install a vanilla kernel. I was a bit nervous about this, but today I followed the advice and whaddyaknow ... it was a piece of cake. I downloaded 2.4.21 from kernel.org at 10am, patched it with the ogfs "big patch" and by lunchtime I had one half of an OpenGFS cluster working, and both servers up and sharing the same SCSI RAID box by 5pm. There are still some teething problems - nothing trivial I'm sure :-) - but it seems to work pretty good.
Apart from doing more tests (and getting familiar with umounting ogfs BEFORE shutdown), there remains the heartbeat monitoring to implement. BJ pointed me to this, which is ostensibly about drbd, a block device, but also contains info on nfs failover using heartbeat. Bingo!
Posted by daen at September 22, 2003 11:50 PM