[Gluster-devel] "namespace" bricks do what, exactly ?

[Daniel Maher]

Hello all,

Pardon my (clearly newbie) question, but what are the namespace bricks
for, exactly ?  I see that they are present in almost every example on
the wiki, but having read a great deal of the documentation, i'm
still fuzzy on exactly what this brick does, and how it incorporates
into the storage definitions.

Also, in the "Install_and_run_GlusterFS_v1.3_in_10mins" wiki article,
the "Example 2 [3 servers, single client]" server config example
contains this rather ominous warning :
# Note: Once exported, DO NOT WRITE DIRECTLY TO THIS DIRECTORY

This, of course, relates to the "volume brick" definition, which
exports "/tmp/export" on each server.  Why shouldn't we write to this
directory after it has been exported ?  Does it have something to do
with the namespace, perhaps ?

If the server generates some data which needs to be in the volume, and
it can't (as per the warning) write directly to /tmp/export, how should
it write the data to the volume instead ?

Thank you all for your helpful responses thus far.


-- 
Daniel Maher <dma AT witbe.net>