As the GlusterFest winds down today, I wanted to write a few words about GlusterFS 3.4 and the beta that was just released yesterday. You may have noticed the news release from Red Hat: The Red Hat Storage team would like to congratulate the Gluster Community on the beta release of GlusterFS 3.4. With new …Read more

Amidst the madness of the OpenStack Summit a couple of weeks ago, you could be forgiven for not seeing a Red Hat announcement about GlusterFS being “OpenStack-ready”. You may wonder, what exactly do we mean by “OpenStack-ready”? The first thing to understand is that storage in OpenStack is multifaceted. It could mean applications storing objects …Read more

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 cod…

The first beta of glusterfs 3.4 is scheduled for release tomorrow, and the project plans to greet this new beta with GlusterFest: a 24-hour test day, starting at 8pm PDT May 7/03:00 UTC May 8. Since I plan on participating … Continue reading →

After quite some delay, I have been able to try out a work-in-progress kernel-tree (3.7) from Sascha Hauer for the Genesi EFIKA MX Smartbook. The Fedora Remix image I have created uses the barebox bootloader to load the device-tree and the kernel (a…

Today, I’m happy to finally unveil something that we’ve been working on for a couple of months now: the Gluster Community Forge. We noticed some time ago that there were several projects out on the internet that extended GlusterFS, and we thought it would be nice to give them a home, where users could find …Read more

Unless this is your first time reading my blog, you are probably aware that I am beginning to become obsessed with the idea of a data transfer service.  In this post I continue the topic from my previous post by introducing a couple of diagrams. A diagram of a possible swift deployment is on the […]

The HDFS write path is lonnnng and hairy.  Here’s some imagery of it (somewhat raw and undervalidated, so please comment if something looks funny).Have you ever seen those little salmons that swim ALL THE WAY up the river, into the ocean, just to …

Archiva is a fully open alternative to Nexus – a simple web-ui for managing and serving up your maven repos.  Setting up a maven repository is as simple as setting up a web accessible directory structure, for example, you can do this using nothing…

Knowing when to release and deploy your code can turn into a complicated discussion. In general, In general, I tend to support releasing early and often, for some value of $early and $often. I’ve decided to keep this simple and … Continue reading →

Here’s an introduction to GlusterFS’ regression testing framework, introduced after 3.3. This will be an important part of testing the imminent GlusterFS 3.4 beta.

{% img right /images/NetappClustering.jpg %}I’ve had a another bee in my bonnet recently. Specifically, it has been to do with hardware vs software RAID, but I think it goes deeper than that. It started a couple of months back with a discussion on Redd…

When I first learned about versioning you were told to “commit often”.  On larger open source projects I’ve been painfully learning that the story is a little different — you want to squash the granularity of your commits so that there is a 1-1 c…

Recently I bought a new keyboard, which I intend to use when my laptop is placed in its docking station. There are two external monitors connected, making the display of the laptop rather useless (only two outputs are supported at the same time). In no…

Playing with gluster in a simple Fedora VM gives you a chance to mess with the translator stack, fine tune your install, and other general aspects of glusterd maintenance.  Here’s an easy to rebuild and tear down gluster-development-environment …

Alex Wheeler was kind enough to write up a GlusterFS Keystone Quickstart guide, which is now on the wiki: http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/GlusterFS_Keystone_Quickstart Hopefully that’s useful for people working with OpenStack. 🙂

Getting networking to work the way you want it to in a VM can be scary sometimes. I recently found it was tricky to have both a STATIC IP as well as internet connectivity inside of KVM provisioned VMs.   The ultimate reason was that the …

Amazon Web Services provides an highly available hosting for our applications but are they prepared to run on more than one server? When you design a new application, you can follow best practices’ guides on AWS but if the application is inherited, it requires many modifications or to work with a POSIX shared storage as if it’s local. That’s where GlusterFS enters the game, beside adding flexibility to storage with horizontal growth opportunities in distributed mode, it has a replicated mode, which lets you replicate a volume (or a single folder in a file system) across multiple servers. Preliminary considerations Before realizing a proof of concept with two servers, in different availability zones, replicating an EBS volume with an ext4 filesystem, we will list the cases where GlusterFS should not be used: Sequential files written simultaneously from multiple servers such as logs. The locking system can lead to serious problems if you store … Continued

  When getting started with github, its easy to get confused between “forks” and “branches”.  In this post we’ll go through a simple workflow for pull-request driven development, including the necessary “trick” to keep your personal “forked” …

Whenever I give talks at conferences, there’s always one particular topic I make sure to bring up. I’ll ask the audience, “Quick, name a new proprietary enterprise software product to have gained ubiquity in the data center over the last 12 months.” I’ll wait a few seconds, and then, “Ok, 24 months.” After a brief …Read more