Re: [tlug] Help with fsck and ocfs2 (or even ext4?)...

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

Hi Christian,

Thank you for the follow-up!


On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 5:24 PM Christian Horn <chorn@example.com> wrote:
> > So, would this work, then?  What if I picked a server on my cluster of
> > 5 servers.  Let's say node1.  I format the SAN as an ext4 and the
> > node1 mounts this SAN.  But then, it exports it to the other servers
> > in its /etc/exports file.  And the other nodes mounts it as if it
> > belonged to node1 using NFS.  Does this effectively mean that node1
> > becomes this SAN's "manager"?
> Sounds good.  If that first node has an issue like broken hard-
> ware which can not be fixed quickly, you could make one of the other
> nodes the nfs server.
>
> NFS without an HA-cluster here would require you to manually make a
> different node the NFS-server.  With OCFS2/GFS2, ideally the client
> would not notice if one of the servers goes down.


Thanks a lot for the advice!  I've done this a week ago (around the
time you wrote your reply) and so far, things have been fine the past
week.  Probably this will work.

I guess one benefit is that there is probably better support for NFS
and ext4 than OCFS2 / GFS2.

We only have 5 nodes; I can see if we had 100 nodes, then maybe less
downtime of the SAN would be important.  So, perhaps OCFS2 was
overkill for our purposes.


> NP.  I'ts a niche topic, I just happen to know something about that
> as we offer GFS2 support and work on the code.


That's good to know!  Thank you!  I've received very little replies on
Serverfault.  I thought it might have been how I asked my question,
but there were also few posts with this topic.  So, "niche topic" is
right.  I don't know how many SANs the vendor sells...but I thought
there would be more questions being asked.

Thanks again for your help!  Without your advice, I'd probably be
struggling with OCFS2 still.  It (or GFS2) would have been a good
idea, but I think I don't have the skills [yet?] as a system
administrator to look after it properly.  ext4 / NFS gives access to
the users immediately and with (so far) no loss of data.  (I've had to
purchase some external HDDs and do lots of copying and moving the past
week or two.)  Perhaps some day, I can look after a cluster and have
the opportunity to learn OCFS2/GFS2 better.

Thanks again for the advice!  Really felt like I was going into this
alone until I saw the replies from you and others on TLUG!  :-)

Ray