Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations Mike Lewis on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Samba vs. NFS

Status
Not open for further replies.

lgarner

IS-IT--Management
Jan 26, 2002
2,348
US
Half of the subject belongs here, so here's where I'll start...

I have several web server that need access to shared storage. Currently this is via Samba on the advice of the software vendor. The web servers each mount a share on another server using Samba, and it works fine. The issue is failover.

If the Samba server goes down, its address is failed over to a second server. The content is rsync'd every few minutes, so there might be some data loss that we can accept. The storage is for PHP session info and uploaded images. A lot of small files accessed very rapidly. Session files are cleaned up daily, so there tend to be 20-30K around at a time.

The problem is that when one Samba server is down, the SMB connections hang and the web servers have to be rebooted to re-establish the mount point at the same IP address, but on the backup server. I've searched for information on how to fix this but everything I find indicates that this is just how SMB/CIFS works.

My questions are: First, is there a way to soft-mount a SMB share like there is with NFS? Second, though this is the Samba forum, would anyone hazard a guess on whether NFS would be a good choice here? The vendor rep indicated that they had seen "issues" with NFS.

Thanks.
 
RHEL 3. So are the storage servers, though we might be upgrading them to RHEL 4.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top