Thanks for the reply. Very interesting. Could you explain how the bsd box read the raw device and built the internal lookup table? The main reason I wrote "not GFS" is because I'm aware of it and that it would take a bit of work to implement. I'm currently looking for a quick fix to give me some time to implement a more robust solution. Also, realizing I had some definite issues w/ my current config, I researched GFS a little while back. It's my understanding that total storage in a GFS cluster cannot exceed 8TB and we have > 12TB. I didn't investigate too much further for a work-around. Andreas suggested lustre which on the surface appears to be viable. -----Original Message----- From: Jérôme Petazzoni [mailto:jp@xxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 12:11 PM To: Jeff Dinisco Cc: Wolber, Richard C; Damian Menscher; ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: mount r/w and r/o [one r-w mount, multiple r-o mounts shared thru FC switch] >>>should I use it? >>>Am I going about this all wrong, is there a better way to do this >>>(other than GFS)? >>> >>> I once heard about someone doing something like that for a video farm, intermixing solaris and freebsd servers (so as far as he, and I, knew, there was no easy sharing solution). He did the following : - create the filesystem on the solaris bow - create many 1 GB files, with a specific byte pattern (512 bytes sectors iirc) - the freebsd box would read the raw device, detect the byte patterns and build an internal lookup table, to know that file F, offset O was located on physical sector S - the solaris box would then write data to the 1 GB files, and the freebsd box could then read back the data, thanks to the previously built lookup table (the 1 GB files would only be rewritten to, never truncated or rewritten, AFAIK) IIRC, there was 2 solaris boxen using some HA solution, and many freebsd boxen accessing the data. This worked because the files were smaller than 1 GB (to be honnest, I don't know the exact size he used), and the very impressive performance of the solution balanced the hassle involved in setting up the whole thing. Now, I would not ask "why not NFS?", but "why not GFS?" (and please apologize if it the answer is obvious...) _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
