I am playing with DRBD for an email cluster at work. It's an awesome way to basically do RAID 1 over a network. Since DRBD is only available in Debian sarge, I've produced backported packages for woody. If all you need is the files, grab them and go. Read on to find out how I made them.

It really was pretty simple. For the drbd0.7-utils package, here are the six magical steps. I found that I also needed to install gcc, fakeroot and libc6-dev on a freshly built machine. YMMV according to your previous usage.

1. Add "deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main" to /etc/apt/sources.list.
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get build-dep drbd0.7-utils
4. apt-get source drbd0.7-utils
5. cd drbd-0.7.10
6. fakeroot debian/rules binary

For the kernel module the official packages use a new module-assistant tool which may work in sarge but I tried the backport from backports.org and couldn't get it to work. So I just compiled from source. This one took me seven steps. Note that I'm using kernel-image-2.4.18-686. Substitute your favorite kernel version as appropriate.

1. Install kernel-source-2.4.18
2. ln -s /usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.18 /lib/modules/2.4.18-686/build
3. cp /boot/config-2.4.18-686 /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.4.18/.config
4. Grab the 0.7.10 tarball
5. make
6. cp drbd/drbd.o /lib/modules/2.4.18-686/kernel/fs
7. depmod -a

Attached below is the drbd0.7-utils package and the drbd.o module that I compiled against 2.4.18-686. Note that it will only work for that specific kernel version.