How do I set up gluster in a simple non-clustered configuration?

Question

I would like to set up glusterfs to replace my use of NFS4, how can I do that?

Answer 1

(inprogress answer, any help testing this and editing would be appreciated, this works and has been tested on 12.04, but only by me!)

This is a step by step tutorial based on Michael J. Chudobiak's guide for Fedora. This assumes that you're trying to share the /fileserver directory from a central server to clients. I could never get this work in the past but gave it a shot in 12.04 and is now actually easier to me than using NFS.

On the server:

Install the server: sudo apt-get install glusterfs-server

First create a volume you want to share, you can name it whatever you want, in this example I'm naming it volumename, and then you use your server's DNS name, I don't have DNS for my machines at home so I user servername.local to use the avahi-assigned DNS name:

sudo gluster volume create volumename transport tcp yourservername:/fileserver

Now we start the volume:

sudo gluster volume start volumename

And that's it! The server is now serving a gluster share called volumename.

On each client:

Install the client: sudo apt-get install glusterfs-client

Now let's mount the shared glusterfs volume

    mount -t glusterfs yourservername:/volumename /mountdirectory

On the client, see if you can access the files in /fileserver. If not, read the /var/log/glusterfs/* files on both the client and the server.

To mount the share at boot, you can add this to your /etc/fstab

yourservername:/volumename /mountdirectory glusterfs defaults,_netdev 0 0

References:

• Mailing list post on migration to glusterfs
• http://www.howtoforge.com/distributed-storage-across-four-storage-nodes-with-glusterfs-3.2.x-on-ubuntu-11.10 (This article is quite good)