 High-Availability
File Server with heartbeat
Steve Blackmon and John Nguyen
Maintaining maximum system uptime is becoming increasingly critical
to the success of any organization. While there are many off-the-shelf solutions
for high availability, they are often very expensive and require expertise that
smaller companies do not have on staff. In this article, we present a much lower
cost alternative to achieving high-availability (HA) services using inexpensive
hardware and publicly available software. A systems administrator can learn
to use and maintain our system with minimal time investment. We will provide
step-by-step procedures for building a high-availability file server for UNIX
and Windows clients. Although the article focuses on how to set up a file server,
the technique could be applied to any number of services.
Hardware and Software Components
Hardware To get started, you will need two systems with at least one network interface each (preferably two), an available serial port, a SCSI controller, and an external SCSI hard drive.
We used two identically configured Intel ISP 1100 servers with 650-MHz Pentium
III processors and 128 MB of RAM. These systems each have two integrated 10/100
Ethernet interfaces and are rack-mountable (1U). Each system has two internal
IDE drives, which we used for the OS installation. For our shared disk, we used
an external 9-GB SCSI drive that is attached to both systems. Our SCSI controllers
are Adaptec AHA-2940AUs (see Figure
1).
Software
We used Red Hat Linux 6.2 (kernel 2.2.14-5.0), Samba version 2.0.6-9 (included
with RH 6.2), and heartbeat version 0.4.9-1 (available from: http://www.l
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