Gluster Community Day, Thursday

I’m here in New Orleans hacking up a storm and getting to meet fellow gluster users IRL. John Mark Walker started off with a great “State of the GlusterFS union” style talk.

Today Louis (semiosis) gave a great talk about running glusterfs on amazon. It was highly pragmatic and he explained how he chose the number of bricks per host. The talk will be posted online shortly.

Marco Ceppi from Canonical gave a talk about juju and gluster. I haven’t had much time to look at juju, so it was good exposure. Marco’s gluster charm suffers from a lack of high availability peering, but I’m sure that is easily solved, and it isn’t a big issue. I had the same issue when working on puppet-gluster. I’ve written an article about how I solved this problem. I think it’s the most elegant solution, but if anyone has a better idea, please let me know. The solutions I used for puppet, can be applied to juju too. Marco and I talked about porting puppet-gluster to ubuntu. We also talked about using puppet inside of juju, with a puppetmaster, but we’re not sure how useful that would be beyond pure hack value.

Joe Julian gave a talk on running a MySQL (MariaDB) on glusterfs and getting mostly decent performance. That man knows his gluster internals.

I presented my talk about puppet-gluster. I had a successful live demo, which ran over ssh+screen across the conference centre internet to my home cluster Montreal. With interspersed talking, the full deploy took about eight minutes. Hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if you have any trouble with your setup and what features you’re missing. The video will be posted shortly.

Thanks again to John Mark Walker, RedHat and gluster.org for sponsoring my trip.

Happy hacking,

James

Linuxcon day one, Monday

I’m here in New Orleans at Linux Con, hacking on puppet-gluster and talking to lots of interesting folks. I’ve met gluster hacker Theron Conrey, and my host John Mark Walker, Fedora and Raspberry Pi experts Spot and Ruth Suehle, and many others too.

The hotel is very nice. The bathroom sink has two taps of course, but both of them are hot. The New Orleans heat is probably the cause of this.

I’m hacking at full speed to get some new features and testing in before my talk on Thursday. I’ve been reworking the simple firewall support in my puppet module. For those that want automated and correct firewall configuration, expect some improvements soon.

I also pushed some work on property management for gluster volumes. This commit adds a list of all available gluster properties. The patch is still missing type information for many of them, because I haven’t yet tested each one, but if there are some you’d like to use, please let me know. This is easy to patch.

More code is landing soon. Don’t be afraid to contact me if you’re not sure how to get started with puppet gluster, or if there’s a use case that I am not currently solving.

Happy Hacking,

James

PS: Sorry I published this late!

Puppet-Gluster and me at Linuxcon

John Mark Walker, (from Redhat) has been kind enough to invite me to speak at the Linuxcon Gluster Workshop in New Orleans. I’ll be speaking about puppet-gluster, giving demos, and hopefully showing off some new features. I’m also looking forward to meeting up with gluster expert Joe Julian.

If there are features that puppet-gluster is missing, or you have a use case that I haven’t covered, please let me know, and I’ll try to work on it for you ahead of the conference. If you want to meet up for some puppet-gluster help, or to hack on code, I’ll be around from the 16th to the 20th of September. My talk is on the 19th.

Special thanks to John Mark and Redhat for sponsoring this trip. Without them, none of this would be possible.

Happy hacking,

James