Long time, no see. Well, I must admit that with the exception of the regular (quarterly) FreeBSD Status Report, I am not working much on other community FreeBSD stuff these days, which makes me feel nostalgic from time to time. That’s why I spent some of my free time on working on the new FreeBSD Handbook section. This time it covers HAST – Highly Available Storage.

HAST was developed by pjd@ and is available since 8.1-RELEASE. It allows to transparently store the same data across several physically separated machines connected over TCP/IP. HAST can be understood as a network-based RAID1 (mirror), and is similar to the DRBD® storage system known from the GNU/Linux® platform.

In this new section, you will learn how to set up a robust storage system resistant to hardware failures by integrating other more advanced FreeBSD features, such as CARP and devd, together.

The full article is available at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks-hast.html.

Thanks to all the reviewers, and hopefully you will enjoy the reading!
If you spot any problems, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.