[lm-announce] IMPORTANT: Maintenance on LMF file servers

[Jonathan Buzzard]

In tomorrows maintenance windows (07:00-09:00) I am going to update the DNS settings for the file server that provides SMB files services (aka Samba or Windows) to point back at the clustered Samba instance. For most users this is likely to pass unnoticed, however a small number of users may get an error message. If you do trying again should work.

After much effort we believe that we have determined the root cause of the problems that we where having back in February of this year and have eliminated them. Our internal testing shows that the clustered Samba is now working on all platforms namely Windows, Mac and Linux.

Should there be a re-occurrence of the problems experienced in February, we will maintain the current SMB server for the rest of the week in a state where we can quickly switch back.

The changes should give much improved resiliency with a failure of a single server being automatically handed over to one of the remaining servers in the cluster. In addition it should bring some performance improvement with three modern servers instead of one old server handling all the requests.

Please bear in mind that due to other bottle necks on the Light Microscope File system significant improvements in the performance are unlikely. We are working to resolve these performance issues, which we believe are down to the unexpected doubling of the number of files on the system in the last year. However this is a longer term task that will take some time to show noticeable improvement.


JAB.



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Jonathan A. Buzzard                      Tel: +441382-386998
Storage Administrator, College of Life Sciences
University of Dundee, DD1 5EH

The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish charity, No: SC015096