Highly available? Of course you are. But did you download DRBD?

LINBIT, creators of the Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) storage system for Linux, has announced that its software has been downloaded ONE MEEEEELLION times. In this day and age, a million downloads for consumer software isn't such a huge deal. But when you're talking enterprise software, and mission-critical …

[Anonymous Coward]

I've not looked at it for a number of years now, but back when I did it seemed very flakey. I assume it has improved?

[W.S.Gosset]

@disgustedoftunbridgewells:

Ditto but I never found it flaky. Just extremely sensitive to getting every network setup just right. Actually, "sensitive" is the wrong word. Essentially its setup was utterly manual. Rawest of bare metal, with essentially 0 feedback/indication of what the problem might be. You could not do ANY of the handwavy stuff that we've all got used to. Which meant you needed to have a perfect match between whatever network setup you'd decided on, and its config. If you did, it was ON. If not, even to the tiniest degree, it was OFF.

Once it was connected properly --established connection-- it was rock-solid. Never a flicker. Indefinite uptime. Not affected by volume, although my hardware couldn't get much over 400MB/s so maybe it flakes out above that.

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience was the same as yours, I didn't like the feel of it so abandoned it. Sensitive is a better description than flakey, you're right.

[bhellman]

DRBD has a lot of tunables to ensure that it can work on anything from a Raspberry Pi all the way up to super computers. That being said, yes it can be a bit tricky to get it running. However, by following the documentation, you should be in a pretty good place.

Additionally, with the latest version of DRBD 9 we support RDMA for high-speed replication. Personally I've seen replication speeds of 2.1GB/sec. with the proper hardware and configuration we could go faster.

[W.S.Gosset]

Foursome

Hands up everyone who's managed to get it working 4-way!

[Lee D]

I joined two of my dedicated servers together, to replicate a filesystem between the two.

Worked quite well, even with me playing loopback device tricks and all sorts.

Never had a problem with it, after setup. You just set it and forget it and it mirrors the FS between however many machines you like and makes sure you can access it from anywhere.

I put all my machine config (/etc and /var for websites, email, etc.) into it via symlink and loopback tricks so that both machines pick up the same config and data files for websites etc. and it just works. One falls over, it logs but carries on regardless.

Just make sure you have the latest version, and I think it needs to have a kernel module IIRC, so make sure you're able to run the same kernels/versions on all machines.

[Eugene Crosser]

Cudos

Was building HA fileservers back in about 2004 (or so). The driver was a bit unstable for our heavy load (for the time), and I had quite back and forth with the guys reporting bugs and testing the fixes. Wonderful guys to work with, very responsive and diligent. I ended up with rock solid setup that was running on dozens of servers for many years henceforth, never gave us any trouble. Quite refreshing after flaky propitiatory HA "solutions".

Very pleased to hear about their success!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Free (software)!

"I'm Highly Available" sounds like Mr Humphries as done by Moss from The IT Crowd.

[Bucky 2]

I used it ages ago with just a pair of servers.

It worked fine, but when I had to take extended sick leave, work decided that "high availability" also meant that we wanted to outsource server management to "the cloud."

It wasn't a wrong decision, but I miss it, because I thought the whole setup was pretty cool.

AS