State of GFS, OCFS2, Clustering, iSCSI, etc. in Fedora (recap a few bits)

[Fabio M. Di Nitto]

Hi all,

sorry if i can't reply to each email properly as I don't have a local
history of the mailing list.

To reply to
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-server-list/2009-January/000059.html

> My concern right now isn't so much about the configuration of these 
> technologies but with the fact that they don't seem to be maintained at all 
> right now and in various states of disarray.

Can you please be more specific? I have been updating redhat-cluster on a regular base in Fedora 9/10/rawhide.
What makes you think they are unmaintained?

> A Fedora for servers that lets these packages bit-rot like that doesn't 
> look very useful.

If you are experiencing issues, either file bug reports or talk to
upstream. We have been extremely responsive to everybody so far.

To reply to
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-server-list/2009-January/000062.html

> Reason? NetworkManager
> never brought the interfaces up again even though the kernel logs showed
> "Link up" messages. Solution: switch to the old networking scripts from
> initscripts.

Network Manager is a desktop/laptop technology a properly installed
server shouldn't have NM at all. This is not something related to
cluster of any cluster filesystem in general == off topic for this
thread.
 
> > That's how I ran into the problems I mentioned. In the near future I will 
> > have to setup approx. 30TB of storage that needs to be available for 5-10 
> > servers. The problem is that OCFS2 seems to be just plain broken,

Did you report those issues to upstream? We work with OCFS2 guys all the
time and they are very responsive.

>  the web 
> > configuration tool described in the RHEL 5 manual for GFS is no longer 
> > present in Fedora

conga is part of Fedora 9/10/rawhide. Look for ricci, modcluster,
cluster-snmp and cluster-cim packages.

>  and the cluster configuration tool doesn't work because 
> > it tries to call command line tools in the wrong locations.

system-config-cluster has been obsoleted. Unless you mean some other
tools, in that case please specify which.

> > What I'm wondering is that if fedora is the basis for RHEL then what are 
> > the plans for RHEL 6 regarding these technologies. AFAIK fedora 11 will 
> > form the basis for that but right now GFS and/or clustering in general 
> > seems to suffer from bit-rot.

The plans for F11 are very well set for upstream and been communicated
across the board through public mailing lists.

Anyway, so far I have read a lot of "bit-rot" this or "broken" that, but
you didn't provide any real info on the problems.
I'd be very happy to coordinate the fixes upstream and propagate them
into Fedora ASAP given enough info.

> > I'm just surprised that GFS is a cornerstone of RHEL 5 but now seems to be 
> > basically unmaintained or is the RHEL team maintaining forked versions of 
> > these tools?

RHEL doesn't have any forked tool. You can check upstream wiki and git
repositories yourself. All our development is done in the open.

Cheers,
Fabio