A while ago I put together a post detailing the installation and configuration of 2 hosts running glusterfs, which was then presented as CIFS based storage.

http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/

This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting). On top of this I’ve also been looking quite a bit at ZFS, whereas previously I had a Linux RAID as the base filesystem. So here is a slightly different approach to my previous post.

I decided to try the upgrade process from EL 6 to 7 on the servers I used in my previous blog post “Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data”

Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here.

The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB. The extra packages installed had mostly come from the EPEL or Glusterfs repositories, and I believe this is where the issues arise - third party repositories.

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:

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.

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl).

Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases. If it does I’ll try update this doc. The idea behind this setup is to use 2 servers as hypervisors (KVM) and have local storage but reslience, I won’t be covering the virtualisation side, purely storage so VM’s will be adequate for this setup.

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night.

The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though.

The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early. Would have given me time to talk about something I really wanted to include, GlusterFS.