David Disseldorp

This talk will cover two new clustering features under development for Samba: Persistent Handles and the Witness service. Alongside a scale-out filesystem such as CephFS, both features can be combined to provide transparent client failover and automatic load balancing.

The presentation will finish with a recap of ongoing and outstanding clustered Samba tasks, focusing in particular on CephFS integration.

This talk is intended for developers and users familiar with Samba.

• Clustered Samba overview
• Current SMB1/SMB2 failover methods with CTDB
  • Tickle ACKs
• New failover features
  • Transparent failover in SMB3
    • Persistent handles
    • Witness protocol
  • Automatic cluster balancing
• Demo
• Clustered Samba outlook / future tasks

This talk will cover how NFS-Ganesha and Samba can be used to export CephFS to NFS and SMB clients such as Windows, macOS, etc. Challenges, including active-active clustering, failover, cross-protocol caching and access control lists will be discussed, with a look at current and future solutions.

Exposing Ceph RADOS Block Device (RBD) images for access via an embedded USB storage gadget can solve a number of factors limiting adoption, namely:

• Ceph storage can now be consumed by almost any system with a USB port
• Ease of use
• Configure once, then plug and play anywhere
• Security
• Encryption can be performed on the USB device itself, reducing reliance on transport and cluster security and access control

This presentation will introduce and demonstrate a Ceph USB storage gateway prototype, running on an embedded Linux ARM board.