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 …

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” …

Slides from my talk on GlusterFS 3.4 in the recently concluded Gluster Community Summit can be found here.
I intend adding more details about some of the new features in the days to come.

Automatic network configuration with DHCP is great. But if you need to use multiple separated networks at once, it gets more difficult pretty quickly. For example, my RHEL-6 laptopconnects through wifi to the network at home, which provides i…

Somebody asked on Twitter whether it was possible, so I tried it. I was able to make it work, but only with some code changes and other very nasty hacks. For the record, here’s what I had to do. Remove the explicit check in fuse_mount_fusermount that causes mounts to fail with “Mounting via helper utility […]

A few of our projects recently called for a distributed file-system that provided high availability and redundancy. After a tip off from a fellow techie and a quick browse around the net it appeared that a solution called GlusterFS appeared to tick all the boxes for what we were wanting. However setting it up turned […]

Jay Vyas walks through setting up GlusterFS with Hadoop, including setting up and developing the GlusterFS .jar file that presents

Chris Hertel of the SAMBA project dives into the integration work between GlusterFS and SAMBA, which will go into the

I’ve spent a significant amount of time recently swatting up on EMC’s new VMAX Cloud Edition. It has to be said that this looks like one of the most interesting storage announcements I have seen in a long time. In fact I have a project coming up that …

I’m generally pretty old-school when it comes to programming tools. Many IDE features either leave me cold (auto-complete) or seem actively harmful to understanding the code as it really is (“project” hierarchies). I do like syntax highlighting, though I’d probably like it just as much if the only thing it did was show comments in […]

Gluster is a distributed filesystem that works well in the cloud. This post explains how to configure GlusterFS on an Ubuntu 12.04 image running in HP’s cloud.
Using this setup, I gain all the benefits of a distributed and replicated (redundant) filesy…

I just wrapped up my presentation at the Gluster Workshop at CERN where I discussed Open Source advantages in tackling converged infrastructure challenges. Here is my slidedeck. Just a quick heads up, there’s some animation that’s lost in the pdf export as well as color commentary during almost every slide. During the presentation I demo’ed… Read more »