[wplug] NFS Availability Issues

[Bryan J. Smith]

Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a server which has the NFS share /home on it, and about 5
> clients that mount /home off of it.
> Today, we had a power outage which took out the server, but only
> power cycled the clients.
> So, the server was down, the clients were up,
> but the users had no /home directory.

Okay, I might be an idiot, but why wasn't your server on a UPS?

If you're answer is "oh, they provide that," I'll just repeat the
question differently, "why wasn't your server on a local UPS?"  ;)

> Is there a good way to mitigate this -- assuming that the server
> will be down once in a while when the clients are not?

It's funny, this scenario came up at the Saturday meeting.  ;)

> It wouldn't be out of the question to buy a second server to
> act as a hot spare at another location, but it wouldn't be
> cheap or easy.  It would be an easier sell if we were getting
> more than just a fail-over capability.

First off, do you know how NFS fail-over works?  We're not talking
just web services or databases here.  ;)

Secondly, yes, and it's quite costly because you need unified,
multi-targetable storage.  In fact, that's a lot of the cost.  ;)


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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     Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution