CAcert System Admins discussion list

[Daniel Black <daniel AT cacert.org>]

I'm currently looking for a system to make CAcert's non-critical systems a 
little more available in the case of hardware failure.

I've currently got a bunch of linux vservers on one machine and have another 
in close network proximity.

My current thoughts are to use chironfs[1] or glusterfs[2] to replicate the 
vserver filesystems to the backup node and use heartbeat to bring up the 
backup 
when the primary fails. At the moment I think I can handle manually restoring 
the primary node.

chironfs is a userspace filesystem that can read from the localdisk when it 
needs to and writes the the localdisk and the secondary node via NFS.
Reasons I chose it:
* no need to replace existing filesystem
* can install it without rebooting machine - just need to restart vservers
* realtime sync
* nagios monitoring
Poorer points that I can handle:
Its IO performance is really slow however I don't think any of the non-
critical servers are particularly IO intensive.

gluster - only just found - seems to include its own tcp transport. Could be 
better. Has nice booster LD_PRELOAD library to bypass fuse.

Any other suggested implementations that are easy to implement or any 
thoughts 
on these two?

[1] http://www.furquim.org/chironfs/index.en.html
[2] http://www.gluster.org

Daniel Black
--
Infrastructure System Administrator
CAcert