Cluster Filesystem on FreeBSD

[Erik Scholtz, ArgonSoft GmbH]

Hi,

I did some research the last two weeks on how to build a cluster 
filesystem on FreeBSD.

Since neither GFS ( http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/gfs/ ) nor OCFS2 ( 
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/ ) are ported to FreeBSD, I took a 
look at the GlusterFS-project ( http://www.gluster.org/ ), which also 
does not compile on FreeBSD 7.x, as well as PVFS ( http://www.pvfs.org/ ).

My solution at the moment is, to rsync all filesystems once a minute, 
which is rather to rare. So I tried to get a hook with KQueue to rsync 
the filesystems on data-change. Unfortunatly I could not find a working 
solution (had a try with IO::KQueue using perl).

NFS isn't really a solution, since it is slow (even on 1GBit) and is a 
single point of failure: Clustering the NFS server with machines in 
stand-by, that do a fail-over on a crash of the master-NFS is unstable 
and makes a lot more costs to the project.

I'm with FreeBSD since the 2.1 release and I really love this system for 
it's performance and stability. But in the last year I came very often 
to a point, where I had no solution on FreeBSD and several solutions for 
Linux (like SAS-support, ...).


How do you guys solve this problem (of a shared filesystem with 
rw-option)? Any hints are welcome, since I'm getting very frustrated at 
the moment.

Greetings,
Erik

-- 

My blog: http://blog.elitecoderz.net