Review: MSI GX70

To anyone not aware, I'm a Fedora user. I've been using Fedora for my desktop machines since my 16MHz 386. There's seldom any severe issues, but occasionally there are. I abandoned Nvidia due to their abysmal support for Linux. [Read more...]

"Software Defined Storage" and "Open": What the heck are they?

A few weeks ago, "Software Defined Storage" and "Open" were all the news in the "cloud" industry as EMC announced they had an "Open" "Software Defined Storage" solution. I heard the news and rolled my eyes. Yeah, right. ... but I was busy with real life things and didn't even have time to read the announcement, much less any of the buzz around it. [Read more...]

Fedora 19 with legacy GlusterFS 3.3

I went into this expecting problems. Fedora 19 ships with GlusterFS 3.4.0 beta and I'm using GlusterFS 3.3 in production. I expected that I would have to downgrade my Fedora packages so I could use my volumes. I expected problems. [Read more...]

PHP playing fast and loose with your data integrity

'Had a potential GlusterFS user state that the filesystem incorrectly reported that a write succeeded even though all the servers were powered off. Since this sounded rather impossible, I asked for details and duplicated the problem. This is the php code:' [Read more...]

GlusterFS bit by ext4 structure change

On Sunday, March 18th, Fan Yong commited a patch against ext4 to "return 32/64-bit dir name hash according to usage type". Prior to that, ext2/3/4 would return a 32-bit hash value from telldir()/seekdir() as NFSv2 wasn't designed to accomidate anything larger. This broke the distribute translator as suddenly the dirent structure was returning 64bit d_off values. When DHT (Distributed Hash Translator) applied dht_itransform() on those values, it would overflow. Since the dictionary entry did not have a cached offset, it would try to create one again and would end up in an endless loop. [Read more...]