Gluster users have different opinions on when the Gluster daemons should be restarted. This seems to be a very common discussion for a lot daemons, and pops up on the Fedora Developers mailinglist regularly.An explanation on how and when Gluster starts…

Gluster users have different opinions on when the Gluster daemons should be restarted. This seems to be a very common discussion for a lot daemons, and pops up on the Fedora Developers mailinglist regularly.An explanation on how and when Gluster starts…

Cutting Edge, a visual effects company that’s worked on films such as The Great Gatsby and I, Frankenstein, had outgrown its NAS storage system and was in search of a way to boost its storage capacity and performance in the face of several large upcoming projects. The Australia-based firm turned to GlusterFS as an alternative …Read more

Apparently lots of people are using Vagrant these days, so I figured I’d try it out. I wanted to get it working on Fedora, and without Virtualbox. This is an intro article on Vagrant, and what I’ve done. I did … Continue reading →

If you’ve been keeping up with our weekly meetings and the 3.5 planning page, then you know that tomorrow, December 6, is the first testing “day” for 3.5. But since this is a Friday, we’re going to make the party last all weekend, through mid-day Monday. Here’s what you need to do: Take a look …Read more

CloudStack could use a Gluster environment for different kind of storage types: Primary Storage: mount over the GlusterFS native client (FUSE)This post shows how it is working and refers to the patches that make this possible.Volumes for virtual machin…

CloudStack could use a Gluster environment for different kind of storage types: Primary Storage: mount over the GlusterFS native client (FUSE)This post shows how it is working and refers to the patches that make this possible.Volumes for virtual machin…

This post continues my holiday detour into things not necessarily tech related. Forgive me this indulgence – there is at least one more post I’ll make in a similar vein. Open Source communities are different. At least, I’ve always felt that they are. Think of the term “community manager.” If you’re a community manager in …Read more

Let us imagine we have a GlusterFs monitoring system which displays list of volumes and its state, to show the realtime status, monitoring app need to query the GlusterFs in regular interval to check volume status, new volumes etc. Assume if the polling interval is 5 seconds then monitoring app has to run gluster volume info command ~17000 times a day!

How about maintaining a state file in each node? which gets updated after every new GlusterFs event(create, delete, start, stop etc).

In this blog post I am trying to explain the possibility of creating state file and using it.

As of today GlusterFs provides following hooks, which we can use to update our state file.

create
delete
start
stop
add-brick
remove-brick
set

#!/bin/bash
VOL=
ARGS=$(getopt -l "volname:"  -name "" $@)
eval set -- "$ARGS"
while true; do
    case $1 in
        --volname)
            shift
            VOL=$1
            ;;
        *)
            shift
            break
            ;;
    esac
    shift
done

wall "Gluster Volume Created: $VOL";

Experimental project – GlusterWeb

This experimental project maintains a sqlite database /var/lib/glusterd/nodestate/glusternodestate.db which gets updated after any GlusterFs event. For example if a GlusterFs volume is created then it updates volumes table and also bricks table.

This project depends on glusterfs-tools so install both projects.

git clone https://github.com/aravindavk/glusterfs-tools.git
cd glusterfs-tools
sudo python setup.py install

git clone https://github.com/aravindavk/glusterfs-web.git
cd glusterfs-web
sudo python setup.py install

By running setup, this tool will install all the hooks which are required for monitoring. (cleanup is for removing all the hooks)

sudo glusternodestate setup

All set! now run glusterweb to start webapp.

sudo glusterweb

Web application starts running in http://localhost:8080 you can change the port using --port or -p option.

sudo glusterweb -p 9000

Initial version of web interface.

sudo glusterweb --username aravindavk --password somesecret
# or
sudo glusterweb --key secretonlyiknow

glusterd-start
peer probe
peer detach
volume-down
volume-up
brick-up
brick-down

This is the first in a series of articles about innovation and open computing. Because it’s a holiday time of year in the USA, I’ve decided that these next few articles will be a detour from the usual stuff you’ll find here. Ever since a few of us got together to form the Open Cloud …Read more

Block device translator Block device translator (BD xlator) is a new translator added to GlusterFS recently which provides block backend for GlusterFS. This replaces the existing bd_map translator in GlusterFS that provided similar but very limited functionality. GlusterFS expects the underlying brick to be formatted with a POSIX compatible file system. BD xlator changes that […]

As a follow-up to my original article on recursion in Puppet, and in my attempt to Push Puppet (to its limit), I’ll now attempt some more advanced recursion techniques in Puppet. In my original recursion example, the type does recurse, … Continue reading →

This post shares some experiences I’ve had in simulating a block device in gluster. The block device is a file based image, which acts as the backend for the Linux SCSI target. The file resides in gluster, so enjoys gluster’s feature set. But the client only sees a block device. The Linux SCSI target presents …Read more

Last week there was a CloudStack Conference at the Beurs van Belage in Amsterdam. I attended the first day and joined the Hackathon. Without any prior knowledge of CloudStack, I was asked by some of the Gluster community people to have a look at adding…

Last week there was a CloudStack Conference at the Beurs van Belage in Amsterdam. I attended the first day and joined the Hackathon. Without any prior knowledge of CloudStack, I was asked by some of the Gluster community people to have a look at adding…

Ironically, one of the reasons that I started writing Puppet code, was so that I could spend more time designing and building, and less time writing documentation. I suppose I’m a victim of my success, because Puppet-Gluster has grown large … Continue reading →

People often ask how to do iteration in Puppet. Most Puppet users have a background in imperative programming, and are already very familiar with for loops. Puppet is sometimes confusing at first, because it is actually (or technically, contains) a … Continue reading →

Setting up your IDE to test HIVE: Export hadoop environmental variables… Maybe some day it will be as easy to run hive fully locally as it is to run pig.FYI, this was just an initial post.  For a deeper understanding of the real details of how h…

Last year I attended AWS re:Invent, kinda, sorta. We were in Las Vegas to put on the first Apache CloudStack conference and most of my time and brainpower were consumed with last-minute planning for that event. I did spend time in the developer area, on exhibit floor, and some of the after-parties – but it […]

If you’ve been following the Gluster and Ceph communities for any length of time, you know that we have similar visions for open software-defined storage and are becoming more competitive with each passing day. We have been rivals in a similar space for some time, but on friendly terms – and for a couple of …Read more