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Red Hat's Global File System on Fedora Core 4

A Fedora Core 4 distributed network file system
By Richard Petersen
Article Rating:
December 27, 2005 09:45 PM EST
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 55,397

GFS File System Operations
GFS has several commands in different categories such as those that deal will fencing, for example, fence_tool and fence_node, gulm_tool to manage gulm locking, those used for configuration like ccs_tool, and those for cluster management like cman_tool. Several GFS commands manage the file system such as gfs_mount for mounting file systems, gfs_mkfs to make a GFS file system, gfs_fsck to check and repair, and gfs_grow to expand one. Check their respective Man pages for detailed descriptions.

To mount a GFS file system use the mount command specifying gfs as the mount type, as in: 


mount  -t gfs  /dev/vg0/mgfs  /gfs1
This will invoke the gfs_mount tool to perform the mount operation. Several GFS-specific mount options are also available, specified with the -o option, such as lockproto to specify a different lock protocol and acl to enable ACL support.

Journal files for GFS are installed in the space outside of the GFS file system, but on the same device. After creating a GFS file system, run gfs_add to add the journal files for it. If you are expanding a current GFS file system, you need to run gfs_add first. Like gfs_grow, gfs_add can only be run on mounted file systems. With the setfacl command you can set permissions for files and directories.

The Resource Group Manager, rgmanager, provides a command-line interface for managing user services and resources on a GFS file system, letting you perform basic administrative tasks like setting user quotas, shutting down the system (clushutdown), and getting statistics on GFS use (clustat). The primary administrative tool is clusterfs. Options can be set in the /etc/sysconfig/cluster file. rgmanager relies on an API GFS access library called magma, along with iddev, which identifies the type of file system on a device.

magma
iddev
rgmanager

Start up rgmanager with the rgmanager script. This starts up the clurgmgrd daemon, providing access to the GFS system.

service rgmanager start

Conclusion
With the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) on Fedora Core 4, you can now set up your own distributed network file system. GFS provides high-level support for hundreds of hosts, allowing them to use the same distributed file system, and, at the same time, providing redundancy to protect against storage failures. The file system easily integrates with the Linux virtual file system, letting you mount a GFS file system on you own Linux system.

References

Published December 27, 2005 – Reads 55,397
Copyright © 2005 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Richard Petersen

Richard Petersen holds a M.L.I.S. in Library and Information Studies. He
currently teaches Unix and C/C++ courses at the University of California, Berkeley.

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news desk 12/27/05 11:01:32 PM EST

With Fedora Core 4, Red Hat, for the first time, released its Global File System (GFS) as an open sourced, freely available distributed network file system. A distributed network file system builds on the basic concept of NFS as well as RAID techniques to create a file system implemented on multiple hosts across a large network, in effect, distributing the same file system among different hosts at a very low level.