[Linux-cluster] DLM Problem - Final Solution

[isplist at logicore.net]

Just an update on this way too long thread for anyone who ends up reading the 
whole thing.

I very much appreciate everyone's help on this, some good things have come 
from it, mostly, totally simplifying my longer term approach.

I think it start with Gordan's suggestion of building an aggregator and from 
there, it's expanded into other things for me based on the many suggestions 
from everyone on this and a couple of other threads.

I still don't know why I was having the strange GFS delays when first 
connecting or using a GFS volume. I thought it might be the storage device 
itself but that was not the case after a lot more testing. 

Talking about NFS got me pulling out my file servers and looking at them 
again. Turns out that it becomes my solution. at least for now. I might use 
GFS for one or two things but it's not going to be in production at this 
point. 

I'm finding that my NFS server will be perfect for sharing and serving up 
static web materials and that the aggregator suggestion ends up being the 
ongoing storage solution for media and other such data. 

I am going to limit my FC use to connecting storage to storage servers such as 
the NFS and aggregator servers. This will de-complicate my setup drastically 
and allow me to simply use a load balanced front end while not having to 
maintain a cluster of any sort. I am getting the same functionality for the 
most part, for the needs I have which are LAMP based services. 

I have several qualstar tape drives which have NDMP built which I will be 
hanging off of the FC network using bridges. For slower long term storage, I 
am trying to find a Linux solution which allows me to build an NDMP server 
which I can attach tape drives to, allowing the server to act as a NDMP front 
end to the tape drive/s.