Is XTreemFS right for me?

[moo...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I am new to fault tolerant file systems and do not know how they work, so I would like to ask a few questions before I roll up my sleeves and get at it.

My use case is providing a file server over the network to client machines.  There is only a single server and no replication is involved.  Occasionally there will be a network interruption and the clients will lose contact with the file server.  At this point using Samba/Windows Shares the applications on the client machines will fail with "An unexpected network error occurred".

What I am hoping for is a filesystem on the client that will stall for as long as the network interruption last, and then transparently pick up again after the network connection is resumed.  Is this one of the features that XTreemFS provides?

If so, how long can the connection persist over a network outage?  Can the connection remain reliable over a server reboot?

If not, can anyone suggest a filesystem or other approach that has capabilities like this?

Again, at this time I am only looking in to single server solutions, not replicated servers.

Thanks,

Tom

[Robert Schmidtke]

Hey Tom, please excuse the late reply as I was on vacation.

Are you on Windows machines only? We have no extensive test cases for that setup, but have used it successfully in the past.

If you're not on Windows, have you had a look at NFS? For your use case this might work just as well.

In case of network interruptions between client and server, the XtreemFS mount will also need to be remounted. The opened network channels will time out on the client side eventually and not pick up the connection again.

Network outages between the servers are handled transparently, but as you mentioned you're not looking for replicated servers.

A server reboot must always be handled explicitly using a reconnect, obviously, as the server side socket will be closed. The client does not reconnect automatically, you will need to do that manually.

I am not aware of a file system that does this, but since this is only a minor client-side implenentation issue, I would guess that someone has done it, which should be revealed by some more research.

I hope this helps a bit.

Cheers

Robert