Daily Archives: November 24, 2011

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November 24, 2011

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My Thoughts on OCFS2 / Understanding OCFS2 [1110]

As mentioned earlier, we have been considered networked filesystems instead of NFS to introduce into a number of complex environments. OCFS2 was one of the first candidates.

In fact, we also considered GFS2 but looking around on the net, there seemed to be a general consensus recommending ocfs2 over gfs2.

Ubuntu makes it pretty easy to install and manage ocfs2 clusters. You just need to install ocfs2-tools and ocfs2console. You can then use the console to manage the cluster.

What I totally missed in all of my research and understanding, and due to lack of in depth knowledge on clustered filesystems was that OCFS2 (and GFS2 for that matter) are shared disk file systems.

What does this mean?

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Exporting X11 to Windows [1109]

Playing Skyrim the last week, sometimes I just missed Linux so terribly that I wanted a piece of it and not just the command line version. I wanted X Windows on my Windows 7.

There has been a solution for this for several years and the first time I did this, I installed cygwin with X11 but there is a far simpler way to accomplish this.

Install XMing. I then used putty, which has the forward X11 option. Once logged in, running xeyes shows the window exported onto my Windows 7. Ah.. so much better.

I actually used this to run terminator to connect to a number of servers. Over local LAN, the windows didn’t have any perceptible lag or delay. It was more or less like running it locally.

It is possible to set up shortcuts to run an application through putty and have it exported to your desktop. I haven’t played with this enough to comment though.

This of course only worked because I have another box which is running Linux. If that is not the case for you, then you might want to try VirtualBox but since the linux kernel developers have described the kernel modules as tainted crap, you might want to consider vmware instead which is an excellent product.

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GlusterFS HOWTO [1108]

So, I  am catching up a bit on the technical documentation. A week taken to play Skyrim combined with various other bits and pieces made this a little difficult.

On the bright side, there are a few new things that have been worked on so hopefully plenty of things to cover soon.

We manage a number of servers and all over the place and all of them require to be backed up. We also have a number of desktops all with mirrored disks also getting backed up.

I like things to be all nicely efficient and its annoying when one server / desktop runs out of space when another two (or ten) has plenty of space. We grew to dislike NFS particularly due to the single point of failure and there were few other options.

We had tried glusterfs a few years ago (think it was at version 1.3 or something) and there were various issues particularly around small files and configuration was an absolute nightmare.

With high hopes that version 3.2 was exactly what we were looking for, we set up three basic machines for testing

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