Questions from a Newcomer

[James O'Kane]

Hi,
	I just read the HOWTO as it is on metalab, dated Dec 22, 1998. Is
that still current with the state of the project? Also are the mailing
list archives available via the web?

I am interested in Linux-HA from a VAR stand point. I'm hoping to invest
my time and money into a worthwhile project in hopes that I can promote
linux and support myself and a business with sales of some sort (depending
on the licensing). Just so there isn't any confusion, I don't plan on
taking credit for other people's work or selling something that I don't
have permission to.

There is some mention of a 'standard' distribution. One of my general
goals is to take one of the big three (Red Hat, Debian, or Slackware) and
build on top of it, depending on what seems right with my research. One
direction I could go with this is to incorporate HA theories into it, and
see what happens from there.

I saw that Coda was mentioned, I recently went to CMU.edu's lug meeting
where they had a talk by Peter Braam, one of the developers of coda. It
shows a lot of promise as a redundant file system. When setup properly,
when a server loses contact and then regains contact with its fellow
servers, it reintegrates itself back in via a logging and versioning
system.

Another talk that I went to was from someone at the Parallel Data Labs at
CMU, and the NASD devices that he talked about seem like they could be the
drive of the future. In brief, they are a brick that holds your data, and
has a fast network connection. These remove the points of failure from the
SCSI bus, the CPU, the RAM, etc. because the data is straight onto the
network. You can find more details than I remember from the talk here: 
http://www.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/.

What caught my interest the most from the HOWTO, was the concept of
several nodes accessing the same set of drives as needed. This appeals to
my hardware and my software side, and that's probably where I'll start if
there isn't something already done in that area?

I'll stop here and see what kind of replies I get back.
-james