Multiple server accessing files

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Posted by acctman, 03-27-2009, 11:19 PM
I have one server right now and will be adding a second server in the next 4-5 months. In the meantime I've upgraded the coding in my community site to act as if there is already two servers. Mainsite.com has all the php files, and a separate HD for mysql db only, UserFiles.com has all the user images and videos. This problem I'm having right now is the permission to delete files from UserFiles.com via Mainsite.com What I've Tried: vsFTPd - it has a small footprint but its not reliable, needed to be restarted a few times while testing on the beta site. usermod - this is messy, changing chmods, owners, grps... etc I tried all of that but still had problems getting the Mainsite to be part of the group without having to change all the chmods and grps. NFS mount - haven't tried yet... Does anyone run a multiple server site? My sites pretty big been around for 4yrs, and i've upgraded servers 3 times since then. If i can't get this to work right my final option would be to continue to upgrade to a new server each year, everytime a bigger and faster server setup becomes available. Current server Dual Xeon 5310 4gb, 3 x 146gb scsi/sas. The server is doing fine with this setup. But with the new site uprade and features it's going to top things out. I can keep throwing ram on the server and move mysql off site. The site has little over 1mil users with about 60-70% of them being active daily... any advice?
Posted by GOT, 03-27-2009, 11:46 PM
Without knowing your operating systems, specifics will be hard to come by, but, basically,: Linux: Use NFS mounts Windows: Use file sharing over a private network
Posted by acctman, 03-28-2009, 12:06 AM
Redhat Ent 4 i686 running apache 2.2.11. is NFS Mount something I can setup without right now without having the second server in place. I may be wrong but this is my understanding of NFS Mount. Basically since I have MainSite.com and UserFiles.com I can setup a NFS Mount and mount UserFiles.com to a specific folder under MainSite.com like /user-images. and when it comes time to add the second server for UserFiles.com all i have to do is move Userfiles.com folder to the new server set it up and everything should continure to work fine since the Mount is set for the domain. If that theory is right wouldn't I still have a problem with user/grp permissions? If this is true then my setup of having the images/vids on a separate domain name is bad. And it should just be a folder on Mainsite that already has permission which would make it easier to mount and move without and problems with permissions.
Posted by UNIXy, 03-28-2009, 03:37 AM
Long term, you're looking at sharing an FC/SCSI SAN array with a few load balanced front end nodes. You'd have RAID stripping on a 12-disk SAN with a couple or more front end nodes directly connected to the SAN. The disk will need to be formatted as Redhat's GFS with distributed locking (or some other FS). I'm not a fan of NFS for actual production real-time file serving. Too many bad memories. Regards
Posted by acctman, 03-28-2009, 07:02 AM
what bad experience did you have with nfs?
Posted by UNIXy, 03-28-2009, 12:19 PM
Mainly poor performance and NFS locking issues when under pressure. Regards