I've had all this FC gear sitting around for ages, finally decided to learn about it a little.

I first installed Qlogic 2100 cards into a couple of RH FC3 machines. (Yes, I know they are old).

I then used a crossroads bridge to connect a SCSI drive array to the fibre channel network. I can see the array from the NT machines I've connected into the FC network for testing.

At the time, I was using a Dell 56F Zoning switch as it's all I had but that would not allow me to see anything on the linux machines.

I then bought a cheap hub on eBay, took the zoning switch out and now the linux boxes can see the array.

I used one of the linux machines to set the drives up. The array can now be seen, read and written to by both linux machines.

Here's my question... how can I allow ALL machines to read and write SHARED data on the array?

For example, I can copy a file over from either of the linux machines but neither can see the other's data.
I know this is normal but now I'd like to learn how I CAN allow them both, and others, to share the data. I'm guessing it's probably in how I mount the array or something else? I cannot afford $$$ storage management software nor do I care to slice it up anyhow, I want large contiguous sharable storage areas.

I think I also understand that win machines are a different story, that those DO require special software in order to share the data.

Thanks for ANY help!

Mike

yes win machines will just grab it all for themselves.

personally i would set the storage up on one machine and share it via NFS.

are you not using hard OR soft zoneing?? you need to be careful in that regard...

Just the fibre cards, the array and the hub. No software so, no zoning or control of any sort at this point.

i think redhat ES/AS allow 2 machines working on the same data in two different machines with CS and GFS BUT this is on linux machines on the same cluster.

If you put winblows machines inn hte middle... you're aiming to high

I went with Linux (Fedora) machines after all. Everything is working fine, all machines see the central storage. I've not gotten into zoning yet since I want all of the machines to share the one single storage space.

The problem I'm having now is finding enough documentation to show me how to set up GFS. I've found countless docs but nothing seems to be easy or clear to understand on GFS.

Anyone know of some docs or howto's on setting up GFS on FC4 or FC5? I did find a good one on FC4 but that never worked for me.

http://www.ethanet.com/FC4GFS/index.php?title=Main_Page

Besides, I really need it on FC5 now.

Mike

Hello mlewis

Have you tried the Oracle Cluster File System? (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/).
There is a lot of documentation, and it's free of charge.

We have 3 GFS enabled clusters in my center. I love it, but it is daunting to set up.

We also use the 56F, and it is a great switch (It's just a Brocade Silkworm)

As to how to set it up, here is a link to the CentOS documentation (These steps will work for any redhat based system):

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/docs/

It's the the section called Cluster Suite - Global Filesystem.

Basically, your nodes will have to be clustered via Cluster Suite and set up with "fence" devices before you will be able to use GFS. The cluster uses fence to immediately cut access off to a FS from a node if the node fails. This keeps the file system consistent. Once a node fails, the other nodes look at the journal and see if there were any transactions that need to be rolled back or completed. This prevents corruption.

It is dificult to set up, but works extremely well once it's completed. We have about 20 TB of data stored this way across our 3 clusters, and the clusters serve 10 million page views per day from these file systems.

Brandon