Migrate GlusterFS to a New Operating System

During an infrastructure upgrade earlier this year I discovered that the in-place upgrade path between CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 is nonexistent — or at least not advised. Suddenly I found myself stuck with the unexpected task of re-provisioning a cluster of GlusterFS storage servers from scratch. To my relief the process was straightforward and, due to […]

GlusterFS mounts fail at boot on CentOS

After nearly a year of running GlusterFS on my compute cluster, I’m surprised it took me so long to run into this bug. I rebooted one of my compute nodes and found that the machine hung at Mounting network filesystems during the boot sequence. From the volume log — /var/log/glusterfs/<volname>.log — on the client, it […]

Update GlusterFS 3.3.1 to 3.4.0 on CentOS 6.4 cluster

Notes from the GlusterFS 3.3.1 -> 3.4.0 upgrade on my storage / compute cluster at ILRI, Kenya. I referenced Vijay Bellur’s blog post about upgrading to 3.4, then added my own bits using Ansible for my infrastructure (I gave an overview of my Ansible setup here). Our cluster is comprised of: Three “storage” nodes (gluster […]

Compile RStudio on CentOS 6

We wanted to use RStudio (an advanced IDE for R) on one of our high-memory machines at work. As our research-computing environment is a cluster of sorts (network-attached storage, with several compute nodes), I have to take extra care to install things a bit more “sustainably”; apps are installed in a non-standard prefix globally available […]