Installation guide

Section 6.2:Setting Up a High Availability Samba Service 113
Note
A complete explanation of Samba configuration is beyond the scope of this
document. Rather, this documentation highlights aspects which are crucial
for clustered operation. Refer to The Official Red Hat Linux Customization
Guide for more details on Samba configuration. Additionally, refer to the fol-
lowing URL for more information on Samba configuration http://www.red-
hat.com/support/resources/print_file/samba.html. To configure high avail-
ability Samba services, a prerequisite would be to know how to configure
conventional non-clustered Samba fileserving.
6.2.1 Samba Server Requirements
If you intend to create highly available Samba services, then there are a few requirements which must
be met by each cluster server. These requirements include:
• The Samba RPM packages must be installed. Red Hat Linux Advanced Server ships with the
following Samba-related packages: samba and samba-common. Note that there have been no
modifications to the Samba RPMs to support high- availability.
• The Samba daemons will be started and stopped by the cluster infrastructure on a per-service basis.
Consequently, the Samba configuration information should not be specified in the conventional
/etc/samba/smb.conf. The automated system startup of the Samba daemons smbd and
nmbd should be disabled in init.d run levels. For example: chkconfig --del smb.
• Since the cluster infrastructure stops the cluster related Samba daemons appropriately, system ad-
ministrators should not manually run the conventional samba stop script (e.g. service smb
stop) as this will terminate all cluster related samba daemons.
• File system mounts for clustered Samba services should not be included in /etc/fstab. Rather,
for clustered services, the parameters describing mounts are entered via the cluadmin configu-
ration utility.
• Failover of samba printer shares is not currently supported.
6.2.2 Samba Operating Model
This section provides background information describing the implementation model in support of
Samba high availability services. Knowledge of this information will provide the context for under-
standing the configuration requirements of clustered Samba services.
The conventional, non-clustered Samba configuration model consists of editing the
/etc/samba/smb.conf file to designate which filesystems are to be made network accessible to