[Pfiffer]

We used a master/master DRBD setup at a previous company, it was kind of a pain to work with. We had a fairly extensive document to solve split-brain problems.

I imagine the problems with DRBD mostly disappear if you're using it properly though, master/slave setups probably work really well.

[kyledrake]

This factored in for me. Neocities is two people. We don't have the budget yet to hire an ops team, so we need to use parts that we can understand without a lot of mental investment. DRBD is definitely something you need to invest in. Github obviously doesn't have our budget constraints and can hire the people needed to really own problems like this.

I also am pretty conservative on engineering choices generally, and the "superfilesystems" (DRBD, Gluster) feel a little monolithic (read: not very unix) to me. It's not that they're bad, it's that they're solving a lot of hard problems, and there's a lot that can go wrong when you have to do that, and if something happens, you're the one that has to fix it.

I'm not religious about "do one thing and do it well", but SSH handles the transfers, rsync does efficient copying, and inotify fires events on file changes. Put them together and you've got a very "unix" solution. It's more or less an event-driven script that sits on the stable solutions to hard problems. If something goes wrong, you just run rsync.

I can't say enough how awesome OpenSSH is. I want to use it for pretty much everything. It's a work horse that really hauls.