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Clustered Samba Service to replace current Samba

Date Posted: October 9th, 2020

Currently Samba is served out from the various file servers as part of the high-availability (HA) stack which also serves out filesystems and NFS. Changes in recent versions of Samba have added new security features that break the way that CHPC was implementing Samba in the HA stack. These changes have forced CHPC to engineer a new solution, a clustered implementation of Samba, called CTDB (Clustered Trivial DataBase).  We have set up a cluster of five nodes, each of which has access to all Samba shares, with new Samba connections distributed among the five nodes via a load-balancing mechanism, and includes a mechanism for re-distributing mounds should one of the nodes fail.
 

This new implementation changes the path users will use to set up mounts for their home directory and group spaces on windows and mac systems.   To access your share(s) through the new solution server merely replace the hostname in the current Samba mount path with samba.chpc.utah.edu.  For example to mount the group space called spacename the mount path which used to be

Mac:  smb://cottonwood-vg1-0-lv1.chpc.utah.edu/spacename
Windows: \\cottonwood-vg1-0-lv1.chpc.utah.edu\spacename

becomes 

Mac: smb://samba.chpc.utah.edu/spacename
Windows: \\samba.chpc.utah.edu\spacename

Additional information can be found at https://www.chpc.utah.edu/documentation/data_services.php#Direct_mounts

This email is our first step in testing this new service.  We encourage all users who use Samba to interact with CHPC storage shares to begin using the service. Through the testing period of this new service we will monitor the usage and load and determine if the additional hardware is needed to accommodate the usage.  During this time the current Samba mount paths will be retained and can be used in the case that this new service becomes overloaded. Once we are comfortable with the new implementation we will announce date, most likely early January 2021, that the old method of Samba mounting will be disabled.
 
Please let us know if there are any questions or concerns via messages to helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu 
Last Updated: 6/10/21