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This is part 2 of a series on building a redundant iSCSI and NFS SAN with Debian.

Part 1 - Overview, network layout and DRBD installation
Part 2 - DRBD and LVM
Part 3 - Heartbeat and automated failover
Part 4 - iSCSI and IP failover
Part 5 - Multipathing and client configuration
Part 6 - Anything left over!

Configuring DRBD

Following on from part one, where we covered the basic architecture and got DRBD installed, we'll proceed to configuring and then initialising the shared storage across both nodes. The configuration file for DRBD (/etc/drbd.conf) is very simple, and is the same on both hosts. The full configuration file is below - you can copy and paste this in; I'll go through each line afterwards and explain what it all means. Many of these sections and commands can be fine tuned - see the man pages on drbd.conf and drbdsetup for more details.

global {
}
resource r0 {
  protocol C;
  incon-degr-cmd "echo '!DRBD! pri on incon-degr' | wall ; sleep 60 ; halt -f";

  startup {
    wfc-timeout  0;
  }
  disk {
    on-io-error   detach;
  }
  net {
    on-disconnect reconnect;
  }
  syncer {
    rate 30M;
  }
  on weasel {
    device     /dev/drbd0;
    disk       /dev/md3;
    address    10.0.0.2:7788;
    meta-disk  internal;
  }
  on otter {
    device    /dev/drbd0;
    disk      /dev/md3;
    address   10.0.0.1:7788;
    meta-disk internal;
  }
}

The structure of this file should be pretty obvious - sections are surrounded by curly braces, and there are two main sections - a global one, in which nothing is defined, and a resource section, where a shared resource named "r0" is defined.

The global section only has a few options available to it - see the DRBD website for more information; though it's pretty safe to say you can ignore this part of the configuration file when you're getting started.