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Old 9th October 2008
PatrickBaer PatrickBaer is offline
Fdisk Soldier
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 81
Default Which OS to use for this?

Good morning,

I have this system here I want to replace with BSD, but don't know which flavor to use. Ok, here's the current setup:

Two Debian boxes running (mainly) LDAP, DHCP, postfix, a pop3 and IMAP server (Openexchange). Box 1 is the live system, box 2 is a standby taking over via heartbeat and kept in sync with drbd.

A first idea is to shut off the replication stuff. The linux-people had a lot of problems and I frankly don't see a lot of use in such a setup. The systems have a RAID 5 and the scenario of three disks crashing at once does not really supersede the problems I am afraid of. The 3ware 9500S controller seems to be supported fine. My problem is mainly the drbd part, I haven't found anything about drbd working with OpenBSD or FreeBSD. Heartbeat is available.

I thought about a setup with device two being an empty machine. Device 1 will be monitored by two other machines in the network. In case of an error, an immediate message is sent to an administrator, who will turn the broken machine off, swap the SATA drives from the raid into the spare machine and turn it back on (where the OS will fetch the current /etc stuff etc. from the raid and copy it to the local machine, keeping that part in sync. No immediate takeover yes, but my opinion is, a stable system does not need such a redundant. The current linux stuff is crashing a lot plus it is not really equipped with a reliable takeover (it needs a real network crash before the second machine takes over). If anything else falls apart, maybe we could use a mysql db to store the email data of 500G, but should be able to handle 2T as well.

So my questions:

1. Does something like drbd (www.drbd.org) exist for OpenBSD/FreeBSD?
2. If so, is it reliable and performant?
3. Can the postfix/mysql combo be recommended for OpenBSD/FreeBSD?
4. Any other recommendations?

Hope someone has experience with those questions and gives some input?

Patrick
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