[Linux-cluster] GFS and samba problem, again

[Abhijith Das]

sandra-llistes wrote:

> Hi Abhi,
>
> Thanks for the reply.
> Please, Could you try to play a video clip from four or more windows 
> simultaneously? sometimes with less than tree clients it can work, but 
> for four or more always fails.
> Could you give more information about your system? is Fedora or RHEL? 
> what OS,samba,GFS version? Any special locking configuration in samba 
> or linux kernel?
>
> I had tested samba with GFS only mounted in one node, and samba hangs 
> likewise, but GFS mounted with no_lock option in node1 works fine.
>
> I download the lastest version for GFS2 and cluster with "cvs -d 
> :pserver:cvs at sources.redhat.com:/cvs/cluster checkout cluster"and I'm 
> trying to make it work in our test environment. I hope this works.
> I don't know if I had said that we have Fedora 5 and not RHEL 
> installed. I don't know if it can be some differences.
>
> Also, I tried OCFS2 and works ok with this samba configuration, the 
> problem is that doesn't support quotas.
> Regards,
>
> Sandra

Hi Sandra,
I'm in the process of gathering a few windows boxes to run your test. I 
should hopefully have 4 windows clients tomorrow.
A warning first up, I'd recommend that you *not* use GFS2 and the latest 
cluster suite for your tests just yet. With constant development going 
on, some components are unstable and more problems is not what you need 
right now :-). The RHEL4 tag in CVS has stable code from the most recent 
release. I'd suggest you compile gfs and the cluster suite from that CVS 
branch.
I'm running a 3-node x86 cluster with RHEL4. The cluster suite and gfs 
are from the RHEL4 branch of CVS along with some innocuous patches. The 
samba version is 3.0.10-1.4E.2. I'm using an smb.conf almost identical 
to the one you posted in your previous mail. I don't have any other 
kernel/samba locking settings that I'm aware of.
You did mention in an email few weeks ago that you were trying to export 
the same GFS mount over multiple samba servers on multiple nodes 
simultaneously (active-active samba). I'm guessing you achieved this by 
setting the locking and pid directories of samba to be on the shared gfs 
filesystem. (This is a wrong approach and doesn't work. There's a lot of 
debate on this in the samba and samba-technical list archives are 
samba.org). I'm wondering if you still have these directories on the GFS 
filesystem, which could possibly be causing your hang?
Also, do you see anything unusual in /var/log/messages on the GFS node 
when this hang occurs? I'm interested in any kernel-panic/assertion 
failures in GFS that might indicate some problem.
Thanks,
--Abhi