[Linux-cluster] iscsi doubt

[ESGLinux]

Hello,



2009/4/20 Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net>

> On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:18:22 +0200, ESGLinux <esggrupos at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > first, thanks for your answer,
> >
> > I suspected it but why can i do it with NFS. ?
>
> Not sure I understand your question. NFS is a network file system like CIFS
> specifically designed to be mounted from multiple clients simultaneously.
> ext3 is only designed with a single accessor in mind.


I´ll try to explain myself

I have a partition /dev/sda

/dev/sda on /iscsivol type ext3 (rw)

but this partition is a target iscsi on another server. I format the
partition with ext3 but its not a local disk, is a target iscsi.

with this configuration I have the filesystem corrupted.

second scenario

I have
192.168.1.198:/nfsexport/                       6983168   2839168   3783552
43% /mnt

but the parttion 192.168.1.198:/nfsexport/ is again ext3 the diference is
that I use nfs as network protocol instead of iscsi.


>
>
> > the nodes never are going to be active at the same time so I can mount
> the
> > shares via NFS. With NFS when I create a file in a share automatically i
> > got it in the shared mounted by all the clients.
>
> I still don't understand your question - that is what NFS is designed for.


Yes I agree with you, but I thought with iscsi i can do the same as with
NFS.




>
>
> > In this case I don´t need to write to the share concurrently
> >
> > can be this configuration a problem?
>
> No, it's fundamentally impossible. In order to have a FS that can be
> mounted simultaneously from multiple nodes, it has to be aware of multiple
> nodes accessing it, which means that it needs coherent caching. Local file
> systems like ext3 don't have this. When one node writes to the ext3 file
> system, the other node will have cached the inodes as they were originally,
> and it won't bother hitting the disk to re-read the contents, it'll just
> return what it already has cached. And almost certainly corrupt the file
> system in the process.
>
> You cannot have a shared ext3 volume with writing enabled. Period.


ok understand it,

but (always there is a but ...)

I only want to share a directory in which one node writes at one and when it
fails the other node has the diretory mounted with the data and can write to
it.

Before I have known about cluster my decission would been to mount the
shares with NFS. Now I want to be more sofisticated and want to use cluster
tools, so I thought to mount it with iSCSI instead of NFS, but always with
the ext3 as the underlying filesystem.

Perphaps this is my mistake.

any suggestion that makes me see the light ;.)

TIA

ESG



>
>
> Gordan
>
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