Distributed filesystem for Debian clusters?

Posted by jooray on Tue 7 Feb 2006 at 09:58

I'm looking for a way to make a Debian web cluster completely fail-tolerant. There is heartbeat, a MySQL cluster and I have two firewalls in a redundant setup. The only thing missing is a file-system, that is completely distributed (i.e. symmetric).

I have tried several solutions to this problem. I looked at GFS and OCFS2, which require a shared storage. I was told, that having cluster-filesystem over NBD, which is not cluster-aware is a serious risk -- GFS and OCFS2 should be used with real shared storage. It is possible to build cheap shared storage using firewire. See this article.But what I'm really looking for is a stable, working, distributed filesystem. This way I could have a backup machine in a different datacenter connected using some form of fast connection. I was looking in AFS, but it seems to be read-only for 2.6 (or that's at least what the kernel option says, maybe using OpenAFS tarball works on 2.6).

Does anyone have good tip for distributed filesystem and/or HOWTO for AFS on Debian?


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