[SunHELP] Economical cluster

[Ivan Kovalev]

Hello, Listers,

I have couple of Ultra1/ Sol8 machines that I need to cluster together
for ftp server ( about 600-700 clients). Both servers have their own
direct attach storage (36 GB SDS mirrors).

It is my understanding, that Sun Cluster wouldn't go on this low end HW,
therefore I was looking for third party solution, preferably software
load balancing and clustering. I have trial version of Resonate's SW to
test for next week. Unfortunately, this will do only load balancing, so
I have to come up with data synchronization. I plan to use rsync for it.
It seem to be a pretty much straight forward solution for active-passive
configuration. 

I think the logic for synchronization portion of active-active
configuration should be like this:
	trap for ftp upload
	disable other server(s) making only one active
	wait for upload to finish
	resync the servers
	put servers disabled earlier back into active mode.

That looks like a call for another daemon or a wrapper. Also, it is not
clear what to do in case of uploads to multiple servers in the cluster
at the same time ( then they would need to select the master server and
form the queue of who is going to be next master).

I would appreciate any pointers to 
1. Alternative solutions for this HW configuration
2. heartbeat / resync scripts for active-active configuration.

Thank you.

Will sum up.


Ivan