Just an update on this way too long thread for anyone who ends up reading the whole thing. I very much appreciate everyone's help on this, some good things have come from it, mostly, totally simplifying my longer term approach. I think it start with Gordan's suggestion of building an aggregator and from there, it's expanded into other things for me based on the many suggestions from everyone on this and a couple of other threads. I still don't know why I was having the strange GFS delays when first connecting or using a GFS volume. I thought it might be the storage device itself but that was not the case after a lot more testing. Talking about NFS got me pulling out my file servers and looking at them again. Turns out that it becomes my solution. at least for now. I might use GFS for one or two things but it's not going to be in production at this point. I'm finding that my NFS server will be perfect for sharing and serving up static web materials and that the aggregator suggestion ends up being the ongoing storage solution for media and other such data. I am going to limit my FC use to connecting storage to storage servers such as the NFS and aggregator servers. This will de-complicate my setup drastically and allow me to simply use a load balanced front end while not having to maintain a cluster of any sort. I am getting the same functionality for the most part, for the needs I have which are LAMP based services. I have several qualstar tape drives which have NDMP built which I will be hanging off of the FC network using bridges. For slower long term storage, I am trying to find a Linux solution which allows me to build an NDMP server which I can attach tape drives to, allowing the server to act as a NDMP front end to the tape drive/s. -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
