Archive
Posts from 2011
Forcing glusterfs to heal bricks that are inconsistent
I mentioned in my previous post [creating clustered file systems with glusterfs] (/blog/2011/11/13/creating-clustered-file-systems-with-glusterfs-on-centos-and-f edora-linux-servers/) that gluster self-healing has a few issues. To see what I'm referring to we can access a gluster client and cp a bunch of data to the glusterfs file system located at /gluster: Once I started the copy operation I immediately reboot a brick to stop I/O from going to it. When the box came back up there was a discrepancy between the contents of the two bricks: Gluster brick #1: Gluster brick #2: Bizarre, ey? This isn't fixed in due time, you need to follow the instructions in the official documentation and stat the contents of the file system to make them consistent again: This return things to normal on the brick that was rebooted: There are numerous reasons you could encounter this situation…
$ read more →My Top Ten technology books of all time
I was having lunch with a friend last week and we caught up on tons of stuff. Both of us are doing a lot of work with VMWare, storage, Linux and interestingly enough we are both trying to learn about Windows Server 2008. As we were chatting my buddy asked me what I thought the best ten technology books of all time were. I immediately said the entire Richard Stevens collection, but then started to think which other books have had the biggest impact on my career…
$ read more →Concert review The Led Zepplin Experience with Jason Bonham
There are some moments in music you will never forget. One that I recall vividly was the first time I heard Led Zepplin IV with my best friend. From the moment I heard "Hey hey mama" in "Black Dog" I was blown away. These guys were hard, they had great drums, an amazing singer, a great bassist and some of the best guitar riffs I had ever heard…
$ read more →Creating clustered file systems with glusterfs on CentOS and Fedora Linux servers
I've been using gluster for the past few months, and so far I am really impressed with what I'm seeing. For those that haven't used gluster, it is an open source clustered file system that can provides scalable storage on commodity hardware. As with all file systems and applications, gluster comes with it's own vernacular. Here are some terms you will need to know if you are going to gluster it up: brick - a unit of storage which consists of a server and directory path (i.e., server:/export) translator - modules that are chained together to move data from point a to point b volume - a collection of bricks At the simplest level, a brick contains the name of a server and a directory on that server where stuff will be stored…
$ read more →Working around various Fedora 16 installation errors
I went to upgrade a few of my lab machines to Fedora 16 today and encountered a number of issues. The first issue I encountered was related to missing "%end" tags in my kickstart configuration file. The specific error was "Section does not end with %end": It appears Fedora now requires the %packages and %post sections to be explicitly ended with an end tag. The kickstart file I was using was from a Fedora 12 installation, and it worked just fine…
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