I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan. There seemed at the time to be a draw to Ubuntu, I was feeling a buzz around the community there that I wasn’t really seeing with Fedora (although I don’t think I was looking), a lot was going on around the Unity project - whether good or bad, it was still going on. So I jumped right in, installing the latest release 11.10 I think it was, joined the forums/wiki/launchpad etc and started filing bugs and generally making a nuisance of myself.

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.

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.