CTDB Movies

We have created a number of short flash movies which demonstrate some of the features of clustered Samba and CTDB.

Disabling a node

This movie demonstrates the use of the "ctdb disable" command to administratively disable a node. We start copying some files between two directories using xcopy in WindowsXP, then look to see what node they are connected to and disable that node. The copy pauses for about 1 second then continues, having automatically failed over from the disabled node to the new node.

Flash movie: Disabling a node

Resetting a node

This movies demonstrates a simulated hardware failure of a node while a WindowsXP box is copying files on the node. We use 
 echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
to simulate the hardware failure. That tells the Linux kernel to do an immediate reset of the CPUs, without any sync or clean shutdown. The file copy continues after a few second pause.

Flash movie: Resetting a node

GPFS Snapshots

This movie demonstrates accessing GPFS snapshots from a WindowsXP explorer window. Snapshots appear under the "previous versions" tab in explorer, giving users a very easy way to access old versions of their files.

Flash movie: GPFS snapshots

Health Monitoring

This movie demonstrates how CTDB monitors the health of the cluster, and automatically disables nodes when one of the monitored services becomes unavailable. In this example the NFS service is disabled, and ctdb notices the failure of the NFS service, triggering the node to lose its public IP address and a failover of file services to another node.

Flash movie: Health monitoring

File Notify

This movie demonstrates coherent file notify support across the cluster. A file is added from a windows box connected to one node of the cluster, and the file immediately appears in the explorer window of a windows box attached to a different node.

Flash movie: File notify

Software Upgrade

This movie demonstrates software upgrade of a cluster node, taking advantage of the all-active nature of the cluster to ensure that service is not interrupted during the upgrade. The software upgrade happens while a NFS client is actively copying files on the server.

Flash movie: Software Upgrade