some thoughts about gmirror

[Mike Wolman]

Hi,

Currently I am using gmirror and ggated to run a live network mirror. 
Obviously this can cause problems if the server exporting the 'backup' 
device is offline then the mirror is broken - when the machines reconnect 
a full mirror sync takes place.  This is fine over gbit crossover and if 
the size of the mirror is only a few 100Gb.

Is it feasible that when the connection to one of the mirror devices
breaks gmirror starts to log the changes to the mirror (obviously you
would need to configure up this mirror device as a 'lazy' mirror member
with a spare local device to write the changes to) - when the machines
reconnect gmirror would only then have to sync the actual changes.

This is sort of achieves a similar result to Live Network Backup on NetBSD 
(http://kerneltrap.org/node/5058).

It could be used for laptop users mirroring their whole drive, allowing a 
fast sync when they are on their local lan and should the laptop get lost 
it would be possible to restore the whole machine with a simple dd.  If 
they were using a usb key as the device to log the changes while they were 
disconnected from the network and they remember to unplug/plug this each 
time they use the laptop then it could even be possible to recover the 
data to the point they actually lost the machine.

It could also be used for asynchronous mirrors over slow links, if the log 
device was always written to first then the write latency for long distant 
links could be removed.  Im not sure if it would be possible to achieve 
this using just a modified ggatec instead which has a local device used 
as a write cache.

Mike.