# GFS (Global File System) Support in Gentoo

## elemur

I was wondering if anybody has tried taking the release version of GFS, reasonably recently open sourced from RedHat and porting it over to Gentoo?  There are a bunch of components to it, including LVM tools, cluster managers, and lock managers, but its a robust and time-tested filesystem.  

(If you are unfamiliar with GFS, its a filesystem to allow multiple systems to access a single storage system, say a SAN, concurrently and safely.  Traditional filesystems don't work well.. even with distributed read-only mounts..)

I've started to pull down the pieces to test on a RedHat Enterprise system I have, but of course, would prefer to have it up and running under Gentoo as well.

thanks,

paul

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## arkane

I've been wondering the same thing.  Since Redhat has opensourced the GFS and DLM projects, it'd be interesting.  No need to hack around with OpenGFS, the original code can be used and extended.  I'm still looking into it, myself.  GFS would be an awesome fit inside of my server room.  I'd love to consolidate into one single share, even if it is for my infrastructure systems.

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## tecknojunky

I wish.

I tried setting up OpenAFS, but it's a no go with a 2.6 kernel.

I'm now trying Coda, but the documentation is so bad, I'm not that patient.

For now, I'm very tempted to roll back to NFS (yuck)

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## kic

I would be interested very much, too. It's not an easy job to be done with all the dependencies, a nice Gentoo ebuild would be nice  :Smile:  Maybe we have to write it ourselves?

Greetings,

Torben

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## tecknojunky

I'd be willing, but for the moment, I feel so close of getting Coda to work.  I'm just not able to authenticate to it  :Evil or Very Mad:  .

I have read a bit about GFS and just the fact that they have developped CLVM (clustered logical volume manager) makes it sound oh so appealing and elegant.

I have gone thrue (quickly) the install.txt of gfs per say, and it did not seem too complicated... to get build, I mean.  Making them all play well together may be a whole different ballgame.

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## Petyr

I can see this an GNBD (Global Network Block Device) being a replacement for NFS, but I'm not sure how good an idea that is really.  I'm sure the data itself would be safe in the normal usage case, but what about the malicious user that comes along and tries to muck up the works?

Petyr

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## tecknojunky

NFS uses the normal Unix file rights (plus ip base security, etc), Coda and AFS has ACLs, surely GFS has security features that makes it probably safer than a normal file system.

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## Petyr

Oh of that I'm sure, no I was more concerned with putting GNBD on a semi-trusted network. NFS for example has a small history of remotly exploitable bugs. That's what I'm concerned about.

Regards,

Petyr

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