I am using Centos. I have read places that you can use Drbd + heartbeat + nfs to make a simple failover NFS server.

I can't find any document that works though. I've tried 20 or so, including some Debian ones.

So, does anyone have any other ideas of how to do this? Point me in the right direction please.

I want 2 nodes. One to be actively serving an NFS share. The other to be ready for failover. If the first one goes out, the second takes over. Meaning, the filesystem is in sync, the IP must change, and NFS must come up.

How should I do this?

Take a look at Configuring NFS over GFS in a Red Hat Cluster. Depending on familiarity you may also want to review Cluster Suite Overview, Cluster Administration, and Configuring Fence Devices in a Red Hat Cluster.

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I posted a response on a similar thread a while back, it may fit your needs

cheers

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Thanks. But these links to not complete the whole setup. In red-hats guide, they simply skip over the installation of the OS, configuration of each node and so on.

I guess the main thing I am getting stuck on, is that the RedHat guide wants a single drive shared among the nodes.

This is not what I am looking for.

I would like Node1 to have NFS and a filesystem, and if it fails, I would like it to bring up Node2's NFS and sync'ed filesystem.

Is this something that can be accomplished with Red Hat Clustering?

No .. RHCS uses a clustered filesystem (GFS/2) .. what you're trying to do has potential data loss, is this acceptable ?

No.

Could you give me a high-level view of what would be needed in my case?

To meet your requirements you'd need a cluster IP (provided by keepalived or something similar) and maybe an rsync running every minute to keep the content synchronised. A cluster built this way is really not a good solution ... shared storage is highly recommended.