Slow but steadily I am improving the packet dissector for Gluster. Once it is in a more complete state, it’ll be submitted for inclusion in Wireshark. Until that time (which will likely take some more months), updated versions of Wireshark for RHEL6 an…

Slow but steadily I am improving the packet dissector for Gluster. Once it is in a more complete state, it’ll be submitted for inclusion in Wireshark. Until that time (which will likely take some more months), updated versions of Wireshark for RHEL6 an…

If you want to hack on distributed filesystems, there is no easier way to get started than by writing a GlusterFS translator. To prove this point, I’ve recently implemented two new translators which are very simple but provide significant benefits in certain situations. These have nothing to do with HekaFS, really, except that HekaFS takes […]

As part of my job, I am doing some tests with the Red Hat Storage Software Appliance. The current version of RHSSA is based on Gluster 3.2.5. After some experiments, it seem that Gluster is pretty cool and surprisingly easy to setup.In order to see wha…

As part of my job, I am doing some tests with the Red Hat Storage Software Appliance. The current version of RHSSA is based on Gluster 3.2.5. After some experiments, it seem that Gluster is pretty cool and surprisingly easy to setup.In order to see wha…

Nixpanic has created a wireshark decoder for GlusterFS/Redhat Storage. This should help immensely in debugging and tuning!

Amazon has built a huge business listing everything imaginable. They have successfully built a brand where you know you can go to find anything. It’s a good move for what Bezos intended.
At Ed Wyse, I’m building the opposite.
Rather than bringing in sm…

In 1814, Thomas Jefferson donated the contents of his vast personal library of books and correspondence to form the foundation of the Library of Congress. Some 200 years later, that library is one of the largest in the world. Yet, the text of all of it…

Our 3rd and final community profile features Louis ‘Semiosis’ Zuckerman. Semiosis maintains a repository of GlusterFS binaries for Ubuntu on Launchpad.net. While he came in 2nd in the contest based on his contributions on our Community Q&#3…

A big part of the value proposition of cloud is to ensure that you have continuous access to your data, and that you’ve moved beyond the physical limitations of a single box or a single data center or a single geography. While the move to the cloud can…

Now that we’ve learned what a translator looks like and how to build one, it’s time to run one and actually watch it work. The best way to do this is good old-fashioned gdb, as follows (using some of the examples from last time). 1 2 3 4 5 …

As of yesterday, my most significant patch yet became a real part of GlusterFS. It’s not a big patch, but it’s significant because what it adds is enforcement of quorum for writes. In operational terms, what this means is that – if yo…

(This is the 2nd in a series highlighting our community contest winners) When you contribute code to an open source project, it’s common practice to find yourself with a hefty job offer from the company sponsoring the project.  Jeff Darcy, autho…

In the first two parts of this series, we learned how to write a basic translator skeleton that can get through loading, initialization, and option processing. This time we’ll cover how to build that translator, configure a volume to use it, and …

If you’re into 1960’s songs about middle class conformity, you may not have a positive association with lots of interchangeable “little boxes.” In storage, however, those little boxes are not only beautiful but the wave of the future. Insider (free r…

We are publishing a series of profiles on the winners of our recent community contest, and today we’re starting with the grand prize winner, Joe Julian. Joe has transformed the #gluster IRC channel in the 2 years since he started participating, a…

Some time ago, we held a bit of a contest that we dubbed the International GlusterFS Scale-out Community Contest. We tabulated results and even selected a winner. And then something happened. A big something – like an acquisition by Red Hat. Not …

In the previous Translator 101 post, we looked at some of the dispatch tables and options processing in a translator. This time we’re going to cover the rest of the “shell” of a translator – i.e. the other global parts not speci…

As of a few minutes ago, the license on HekaFS changed from AGPLv3+ to GPLv3 – not AGPL, not LGPL, not later versions. This only affects the git repository so far; packages with the change still need to be built, then those need to be pushed into…

This is the first post in a series that will explain some of the details of writing a GlusterFS translator, using some actual code to illustrate. Before we begin, a word about environments. GlusterFS is over 300K lines of code spread across a few hundr…