This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Debian Wheezy. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!
1 Preliminary Note
In this tutorial I use two systems, a server and a client:
- server1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.100 (server)
- client1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.101 (client)
Both systems should be able to resolve the other system's hostname. If this cannot be done through DNS, you should edit the /etc/hosts file so that it looks as follows on both systems:
vi /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 192.168.0.100 server1.example.com server1 192.168.0.101 client1.example.com client1 # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters |
(It is also possible to use IP addresses instead of hostnames in the following setup. If you prefer to use IP addresses, you don't have to care about whether the hostnames can be resolved or not.)
2 Setting Up The GlusterFS Server
server1.example.com:
GlusterFS is available as a package for Debian Wheezy, therefore we can install it as follows:
apt-get install glusterfs-server
The command
glusterfsd --version
should now show the GlusterFS version that you've just installed (3.2.7 in this case):
root@server1:~# glusterfsd --version
glusterfs 3.2.7 built on Nov 12 2012 19:30:08
Repository revision: git://git.gluster.com/glusterfs.git
Copyright (c) 2006-2011 Gluster Inc. <http://www.gluster.com>
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of GlusterFS under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
root@server1:~#
If you use a firewall, ensure that TCP ports 111, 24007, 24008, 24009-(24009 + number of bricks across all volumes) are open on server1.example.com.
Next we create the share named testvol on localhost (= server1) in the /data directory (this will be created if it doesn't exist):
gluster volume create testvol server1.example.com:/data
root@server1:~# gluster volume create testvol server1.example.com:/data
Creation of volume testvol has been successful. Please start the volume to access data.
root@server1:~#
Start the volume:
gluster volume start testvol
It is possible that the above command tells you that the action was not successful:
root@server1:~# gluster volume start testvol
Starting volume testvol has been unsuccessful
root@server1:~#
You can check the status of the volume with the command
gluster volume info
root@server1:~# gluster volume info
Volume Name: testvol
Type: Distribute
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 1
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: server1.example.com:/data
root@server1:~#
If it tells you that the volume is started, everything is fine, otherwise just start it again.
By default, all clients can connect to the volume. If you want to grant access to client1.example.com (= 192.168.0.101) only, run:
gluster volume set testvol auth.allow 192.168.0.101
Please note that it is possible to use wildcards for the IP addresses (like 192.168.*) and that you can specify multiple IP addresses separated by comma (e.g. 192.168.0.101,192.168.0.102).
The volume info should now show the updated status:
gluster volume info
root@server1:~# gluster volume info
Volume Name: testvol
Type: Distribute
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 1
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: server1.example.com:/data
Options Reconfigured:
auth.allow: 192.168.0.101
root@server1:~#
3 Setting Up The GlusterFS Client
client1.example.com:
On the client, we can install the GlusterFS client as follows:
apt-get install glusterfs-client
Then we create the following directory:
mkdir /mnt/glusterfs
That's it! Now we can mount the GlusterFS filesystem to /mnt/glusterfs with the following command:
mount.glusterfs server1.example.com:/testvol /mnt/glusterfs
You should now see the new share in the outputs of...
mount
root@client1:~# mount
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=126813,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=102704k,mode=755)
/dev/mapper/server1-root on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=205400k)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw,relatime,errors=continue)
rpc_pipefs on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw,relatime)
server1.example.com:/testvol on /mnt/glusterfs type fuse.glusterfs (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)
root@client1:~#
... and...
df -h
root@client1:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 29G 1.2G 26G 5% /
udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev
tmpfs 101M 240K 101M 1% /run
/dev/mapper/server1-root 29G 1.2G 26G 5% /
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 201M 0 201M 0% /run/shm
/dev/sda1 228M 18M 199M 9% /boot
server1.example.com:/testvol 29G 1.2G 26G 5% /mnt/glusterfs
root@client1:~#
Instead of mounting the GlusterFS share manually on the client, you could modify /etc/fstab so that the share gets mounted automatically when the client boots.
Open /etc/fstab and append the following line:
vi /etc/fstab
[...] server1.example.com:/testvol /mnt/glusterfs glusterfs defaults,_netdev 0 0 |
To test if your modified /etc/fstab is working, reboot the client:
reboot
After the reboot, you should find the share in the outputs of...
df -h
... and...
mount
4 Links
- GlusterFS: http://www.gluster.org/
- GlusterFS 3.2 Documentation: http://download.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/3.2/Documentation/AG/html/index.html
- Debian: http://www.debian.org/