Why Replicated Filesystems Are Hard

"So what makes replication hard?\r\nYour friends want you all to share\ \ a single list to see if, as a group, you can try every micro-brew on both continents.\ \ How do replicated filesystems handle this?" [Read more...]

Introduction to GlusterFS at SASAG Nov 8

If you're in the Seattle area and would like to meet up and hear me talk about GlusterFS, come to the Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild meeting 7:00pm November 8th at the University of Washington (Bldg EE1, Rm 403). There will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics so even if I suck, it won't be a complete waste of time. [Read more...]

Replacing a GlusterFS Server: Best Practice

Last month, I received two new servers to replace two of our three (replica 3) GlusterFS servers. My first inclination was to just down the server, move the hard drives into the new server, re-install the OS (moving from 32 bit to 64 bit), and voila, done deal. Probably would have been okay if I hadn't used a kickstart file that formatted all the drives. Oops. Since the drives were now blank, I decided to just put it in place, using the same gfid and let it self-heal everything back over. [Read more...]