As I look over 6 very interesting projects overview on my desk, I’m forced to do a bit of thinking about how the last year went by. A year is a lot of time, and so much plans finally came to fruition that I can’t think of listing them all here today. Which is kinda a good sign for me and my enterprise ;-)
Most of my readers doesn’t really know who I am, even when you take into account that I blog under my real name. Most don’t know that I bought a condo in Hull (now part of Gatineau, near Ottawa – the capital of Canada), that I still have a rent in Montreal, that I proposed to my girlfriend (she said “Yes!”), that I own a dog (greatest experience of forcing a regular schedule I ever had), that my greatest motivation in life is to be able to go where I want, whenever I want. My dream is going back to Yosemite, California… and bring hiking gear.
Another big aspect of my life is my business, Les Laboratoires Phoenix. I’ve been working full time at it for the last 9 months and its been a great experience. Over those months : I’ve worked with clients from 7 countries, contributed to 3 major open source projects, went to the “Free Software Foundation” Libre Planet confrence in Boston, went to the DefCon in Las Vegas, I’ve been named SME for {Zabbix, Zimbra, Asterisk, OpenLDAP, extended LAMP Stack, Mailman, GlusterFS, Lustre, MySQL, Cloud Computing, …}, 3 of my articles have been published (>40K prints), and I’m involved in a book project (from a major publisher)…
And, even thinking about all those achievements, I still look for the future of Les Laboratoires Phoenix. I guess that working with startups influenced me a lot : those 6 projects are all different from each others, they represent good revenue potential (clear business plan) and require low capital input to be started. So, I guess I’ll stop speaking about them and work ;-). Btw, two of those projects would be online services (SAAS) for well known parts of Internet infrastructure (not webserver). Another is a cloud computing infrastructure services based in Montreal (this one if almost finished! & I got an hardware provider)… A lot of fun to be had.
More news to come.
Couples of stats/facts.
glusterfs & synchronous data storage
Labs: installation & configuration of GlusterFS as synchronous data storage solution.
By: Pascal Charest, Freesoftware consultant
Date: September, 2008.
Synchronization of files in a cloud environment is a challenge in the path of high-{availability, performance}. From simple load balanced web sites to full-blown applications – some files always need to be in sync. Peoples, for simplicity, rely on asynchronous transfer (ie: rsync ), others deploy bigger solutions (ie: block device replication through DRBD or shared storage through AoE protocol & concurrency management with OCFSv2) or even go for the “lazy” “no-shared-storage” solution through NFS.
To address this problem in the PraizedMedia software stack, I decided to give FUSE based GlusterFS a try. Awesome, really ! The technical knowledge to deploy a basic solution is very very low. The modularity of the program also help to have “something working right now”. This isn’t meant as a direct alternative to DRBD or a good SAN deployment but in my use case, it fit perfectly.
In this lab, I will guide you through the installation of GlusterFS on 2 networked systems. They will be both used as “servers” & “client” for the GlusterFS filesystem. They will be sharing a directory (on both system : /var/production/brick), re-mounted as /var/production/static through GlusterFS. Any write I/O on this directory (of any client server) will be synchronized to the pool. This last feature is called “AFR” (for automatic file replication) and is a module (called a translator) to the GlusterFS file system.
The specificity of my environment is around the file-locking management : I don’t need any. By design, the application will never try to write the same file twice on any of the server.
#Installation of requirement (standard tools)
apt-get install flex bison libfuse-dev linux-headaers-`uname -r` curl
#download of the sources
cd /usr/local/src/
curl -O http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/1.3/glusterfs-CURRENT.tar.gz
tar zxf glusterfs-CURRENT.tar.gz
# configure
cd glusterfs-1.3.11
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/glusterfs-1.3.11
make && make install
ln -s /usr/local/glusterfs-1.3.11 /usr/local/glusterfs
So we now have a basic 2 servers GlusterFS systems installed. Lets be honest, that wasn’t really hard! We are still missing configuration files though.
#Editing /usr/local/glusterfs/etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-server.vol
#
# glusterfs-servers definition
# volume definition are on first lvl, other are on second lvl (tabbed)
volume brick
type storage/posix
option directory /mnt/production/brick
end-volume
volume server
type protocol/server
option transport-type tcp/server
option auth.ip.brick.allow *
subvolumes brick
end-volume
#Editing the /usr/local/glusterfs/etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-client.vol
#
# glusterfs-client.vol
# volume definition are on first lvl, other are on second lvl (tabbed)
#
volume remote1
type protocol/client
option transport-type tcp/client
option remote-host 002.praized.com
option remote-subvolume brick
end-volume
volume remote2
type protocol/client
option transport-type tcp/client
option remote-host 001.praized.com
option remote-subvolume brick
end-volume
volume mirror0
type cluster/afr
subvolumes remote1 remote2
end-volume
#Launching services (servers and clients)
mkdir -p /mnt/production/brick
/usr/local/glusterfs-1.3.11/sbin/glusterfsd -f /usr/local/glusterfs-1.3.11/etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-server.vol
mkdir -p /mnt/production/static
/usr/local/glusterfs-1.3.11/sbin/glusterfs -f /usr/local/glusterfs-1.3.11/etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-client.vol /mnt/production/static/
You now possess a synchronized directory between your two systems. Please note that GlusterFS require TCP/6996 port to be open. There is also some improvement that can be done to this setup through adding a locking mechanism & i/o thread – I don’t currently need them, but you might.
Enjoy!
Debugging notes ; after starting the server process you should have a kernel process call glusterfs. All log files are in /usr/local/glusterfs/var/log/glusterfs*. After starting the client, “df -h” should show you your new mount point. Careful with UID/GID (&Permission), there is no such thing as root_squash_fs in GlusterFS yet.
Other notes ; Using Amazon EBS would have been the perfect solution if they did allow multiple servers-volume mount and lets us deal with concurrency / lock problems. But, they don’t.