This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality.

Prerequisites:

2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be:

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera. Normally I cover most of my projects on here but this one has been a little different as it was featured in this months Linux Voice magazine. For this very reason I won’t feature a write-up here, just a few images and videos captured using it and a couple of pointers to the software used in the project.

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig. Although maybe not installed by default, it can be installed quite easily from yum, however it comes bundled with a number of tools so the package name isn’t all that obvious.

[root@server ~]# yum install bind-utils

Will do the trick, now how to use it?

[root@server ~]# dig @nameserver address.com

Over the past 12 months or so I’ve been looking to add various “Smart House” components to my home, rather than do this in the traditional sense of buying something off-the-shelf I’ve been experimenting and building my own. One of the real plus points in me doing this is that all the data that is passed around is in an open standard and format chosen by me, not some cludge to try and extract information in a format decided by a-n-other manufacturer.

I recently replaced a couple of servers within a friends business with an oVirt virtualisation setup, I’m really pleased with the whole configuration which consists of a single engine host and 2 hypervisor nodes, the storage is shared over the 2 hosts with glusterfs. The guests which run on the platform replace the services that ran separately on a couple of physical servers, LAMP stack for intranet, Asterisk PBX, postfix/dovecot mailserver, squid proxy cache, Bind DNS, and DHCP server.

I thought I’d finish off the year with a bit of reflection, overall it’s been a pretty good year in both camps of my life - the geek/tech and the family side. Obvious highs of the year include:

• Birth of my second child, Alfie.
• OggCamp 13
• LinuxCon Europe
• Barcamp Blackpool
• RossLUGs 3rd year - some fantastic meetings this year.

It certainly has been a full on year.

It’s been a really tech filled year, as since moving house last September I’ve had my own space for all my tech which is a real bonus. It’s allowed me to really get back into electronics with Arduino building the home automation system, the electric meter monitor (still to be finished) and more recently bringing a snowman christmas decoration back to life:

Whoa I’m getting a bit slow here!

After the full on weekend of OggCamp my marathon continued up in Edinburgh for LinuxCon Europe 2013. Unfortunately my plan of heading up straight from OggCamp was scuppered, but I set off first thing on Monday morning. I decided to stick with driving after toying with the idea of getting the train. Glad I did, the Edinburgh park and ride system is brilliant! Parked up at Sheriffhall which allowed me to stay up to 7 days, perfect.

Although it’s been over a week since I returned from both these events I thought I better put a little something up about them and the experiences I had there.

Unfortunately Oggcamp and LinuxCon followed each other directly this year, so it meant a lot of heaving about over the course of about a week. Here’s part 1 where I will detail my time at OggCamp.

The event I look forward to all year, took a little longer to arrive this year due to it being moved to October (Oggtober?), happened over the weekend of the 19th & 20th October and much fun was to be had. As being part of the crew last year was so much fun (and hard work) I couldn’t resist doing the same this year, although I was a part timer this year due to also running a Fedora stand and a stand for our LUG (RossLUG). I arrived on the Friday evening to the guffaw of an unexpected art exhibition going off in the lobby of the John Lennon Art and Design building at John Moores University, I say unexpected as it was exactly that. The exhibition, although the building was booked for over 6 months, was arranged the week previous and we couldn’t gain access to setup much on the Friday. Even when that finished the caretaker decided enough was enough and it was home time. So off I went to find Rita’s B&B at the other side of town. Lovely place, a bit dated but very homely and Rita was lovely, I described her to various folks as looking like the oracle from the Matrix (the first one not the second). Proper tea, coffee and biscuits on the bedside table too!

It’s been a while since I stayed up most of the night writing code, mainly down to having a young daughter but also down to the fact I haven’t found anything that needed a late night hack session to produce a result. This weekend changed all that, I’ve been playing around with home automation for a while but am now actually taking the plunge. I purchased a load of Arduino and electronics kit over the last few days to start prototyping the setup.