Hi,
We have two netapp filers serving mainly static data (updated overnight) to several hp-ux clients.
If one server fails we can swap the clients onto the other server by mounting and switching symbollic links.
eg. on a client:
/discs/data -> /netapp1/data
If netapp1 fails we mount data from netapp2 and relink:
/discs/data -> /netapp2/data
Now this leaves processes hanging on the dead server which can be killed using fuser -k netapp1:/data. This is only necessary if memory/swap on the clients is tight, otherwise the "hung" processes will sleep until the server comes back.
This is not ideal so I had a thought, since we have Quad 100BaseT cards, in the event of a failure, we could configure up a spare port to be the same name and IP address as the dead server and therefore take over the nfs requests for it.
Since we are LIVE I am unable to test this, but subject to the routers and arp tables becoming updated I would have thought this would work. I'm not sure about file locking, but I didn't think this works very well on nfs anyway - does it ? NFS is stateless so it should be ok.
Anyone out there tried this or able to on a couple of test boxes ?
Cheers
Ian Gardner Vodafone Ltd. Newbury UK. ian.gardner@vf.vodafone.co.uk