[Gluster-devel] Gluster Recovery

[Danson Michael Joseph]

Hi,

I recently compiled and tested Gluster 1.3 on Ubuntu 7.04 and all went well. 
Originally I intended to use DRBD in our small cluster of 2 machines but
couldn't get the module to compile.  The feature needed in DRBD is really the
self-recovery after failure.  SO after choosing gluster, I'm looking for
answers to two operational questions:

1) If DRBD rolls over from slave to primary and then the primary goes online
again, the original primary will become slave and copy/resync with the old
slave which is now primary.  In gluster is this as simple as using a rsync
script to achieve the same?

2) Lustre uses metadata on two or distributed MetaData Servers.  I presume this
means that if a storage node fails and I go out and buy a new machine and plug
it in, the MDS server will re-populate the new server with what was on the old
server, based on it's MDS knowledge and the replicated data on other servers. 
If gluster has no MDS, how can replication take place?  There seems to be know
"knowledge" of the system like a MDS server has?

Regards,

--
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Danson Michael Joseph
danson.joseph at baobabelectric.com
PO BOX 1768, BEDFORDVIEW, 2008, SOUTH AFRICA
+27 82 820 4261