GlusterFS 3.5 has not been released yet, but that should happen hopefully anytime soon (currently in beta). The RPM-packaging in this version has changed a little, and now offers a glusterfs-cli package. This package mainly contains the gluster commandline interface (and pulls in any dependencies). On of the very useful things that is now made possible, is to list the available volumes on Gluster Storge Servers. This similar functionality is used by the /etc/auto.
This is an example of how to configure an environment where you can test CloudStack and Gluster. It uses two machines on the same LAN, one acts as a KVM hypervisor and the other as storage and management server. Because the (virtual) networking in the hypervisor is a little more complex than the networking on the management server, the hypervisor will be setup with an OpenVPN connection so that the local LAN is not affected with 'foreign' network traffic.
Gluster users have different opinions on when the Gluster daemons should be restarted. This seems to be a very common discussion for a lot daemons, and pops up on the Fedora Developers mailinglist regularly. An explanation on how and when Gluster starts its daemons is probably in order. A storage server running Gluster always has at least one process running, the management daemon (glusterd). The management daemon is responsible for building the Trusted Pool (aka cluster) of the Friends (other storage servers) that it knows.
CloudStack could use a Gluster environment for different kind of storage types: Primary Storage: mount over the GlusterFS native client (FUSE) This post shows how it is working and refers to the patches that make this possible.Volumes for virtual machines: use the libgfapi integration in QEMU Next upcoming task, initial untested patch in the wip-branch.Secondary Storage: mount over the GlusterFS native client (FUSE)The currentwork-in-progress repository on the Gluster Community Forge already has functional support for creating Primary Storage on existing Gluster environments: Infrastructure -> Primary Storage -> Add Primary StorageAdd Primary StorageInfrastructure -> Zones -> Add Zone - [wizard]Add Primary Storage through the Zone WizardVia the Infrastructure -> Primary Storage menu, the details of the newly created storage can be displayed.
Last week there was a CloudStack Conference at the Beurs van Belage in Amsterdam. I attended the first day and joined the Hackathon. Without any prior knowledge of CloudStack, I was asked by some of the Gluster community people to have a look at adding support for Gluster in CloudStack. An interesting topic, and of course I'll happily have a go at it. CloudStack seems quite a nice project. The conference showed an awesome part of the community, loads of workshops and a surprising number of companies that sponsor and contribute to CloudStack.
After quite some delay, I have been able to try out a work-in-progress kernel-tree (3.7) from Sascha Hauer for the Genesi EFIKA MX Smartbook. The Fedora Remix image I have created uses the barebox bootloader to load the device-tree and the kernel (a zImage with concatenated initramfs). The contents of the image is based on the Fedora 18 Generic Root Filesystem armhfp. XFCE and most of the desktop basics are included.
Recently I bought a new keyboard, which I intend to use when my laptop is placed in its docking station. There are two external monitors connected, making the display of the laptop rather useless (only two outputs are supported at the same time). In normal circumstances the laptop lid will be closed, so the keyboard is not accessible. My new keyboard is a Logitech K760 and is connected through bluetooth. Pairing with help from the the XFCE/GNOME tools is easy enough, but this causes the keyboard to be available after login only.
Automatic network configuration with DHCP is great. But if you need to use multiple separated networks at once, it gets more difficult pretty quickly. For example, my RHEL-6 laptop connects through wifi to the network at home, which provides internet accessaccesses remote systems connected via a VPNand manages virtual machines that need access to any of those Now, when NetworkManager connects to the VPN, the DNS-servers for the VPN are added to /etc/resolv.conf with a higher priority than the home network one.
Not all projects I am regularly working on use the same CodingStyle. This is very unfortunate, and sometimes makes it time consuming to provide acceptable patches. One common example is that some project indent with a <tab>, where others expect <4-spaces>. I could not find a vim plugin or other extension that lets me pick vim-settings per git repository. The idea that I came up with, is to set the project specific vim-settings in the git-config itself.
It seems that the maintainer of the wireshark package in Fedora has updated to version 1.8.1 in the current Fedora Rawhide, which will become Fedora 18. The schedule tells us that Fedora 18 is planned to be released on 2012-11-06 (the latest schedule may have an updated date). This is good news for the Gluster Community (and support engineers like me), as Wireshark 1.8 contains support for most of the Gluster protocols: