[Gluster-devel] Installing GlusterFS 3.4.x, 3.5.x or 3.6.0 on RHEL or CentOS 6.6

Wed Nov 5 20:35:07 UTC 2014

    This is a post that will also appear on http://blog.gluster.org and on
    http://planet.fedoraproject.org. A description like this is planned to
    get included on the Gluster wiki.

    Comments and further ideas are very welcome, please share them by
    replying to this email.

    Thanks,
    Niels

With the release of RHEL-6.6 and CentOS-6.6, there are now glusterfs packages
in the standard channels/repositories. Unfortunately, these are only the
client-side packages (like glusterfs-fuse and glusterfs-api). Users that want
to run a Gluster Server on a current RHEL or CentOS now have difficulties
installing any of todays current version of the Gluster Community packages.

The most prominent issue is that the glusterfs package from RHEL has a version
of 3.6.0.28, and that is higher than the last week released version of 3.6.0.
RHEL is shipping a pre-release that was created while the Gluster Community was
still developing 3.6. An unfortunate packaging decision added a .28 to the
version, where most other pre-releases would fall-back to a (rpm-)version like
3.6.0-0.1.something.bla.el6. The difference might look minor, but the result is
a major disruption in the much anticipated 3.6 community release [1].

For the immediate need to fix this in a most easy way for our community users,
we have decided to release version 3.6.1 later this week (maybe on Thursday
November 6). This version is higher than the version in RHEL/CentOS, and
therefore yum will prefer the package from the community repository over the
one available in RHEL/CentOS. This is also the main reason why there have been
no 3.6.0 packages provided on the download server.

Installing an older stable release (like 3.4 or 3.5) on RHEL/CentOS 6.6
requires a different approach. At the moment we can offer two solutions that
can be used. We are still working on making this easier, until that is
finalized, some manual actions are required.

Lets assume you want to verify if todays announced glusterfs-3.5.3beta2 [2]
packages indeed fix that bug you reported. (These steps apply to the other
versions as well, this just happens to be what I have been testing.)

Option A: use exclude in the yum repository files for RHEL/CentOS

 1. download the glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo [3] file and save it under
    /etc/yum.repos.d/

 2. edit /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo or /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and
    under each repository that you find, add the following line

        exclude=glusterfs*

This prevents yum from installing the glusterfs* packages from the standard
RHEL/CentOS repositories, but allows those packages from others. The Red Hat
Customer Portal has an article about this configuration [4] too.

Option B: install and configure yum-plugin-priorities

Using yum-plugin-priorities is probably a more stable solution. This does not
require changes to the standard RHEL/CentOS repositories. However, an
additional package needs to get installed.

 1. enable the optional repository when on RHEL, CentOS users can skip this step

        # subscription-manager repos --list | grep optional-rpms
        # subscription-manager repos --enable=*optional-rpms

 2. install the yum-plugin-priorities package:

        # yum install yum-plugin-priorities

 3. download the glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo [3] file and save it under
    /etc/yum.repos.d/

 4. edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo file and add the
    following option to each repository definition:

        priority=50

The default priority for repositories is 99. The repositories with the lowest
number have the highest priority. As long as the RHEL/CentOS repositories do
not have the priority option set, the packages from the
glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo will get preferred by yum.

When using the yum-plugin-priorities approach, we highly recommend that you
check if all your repositories have a suitable (or missing) priority option. In
case some repositories have the option set, but yum-plugin-priorities was not
installed yet, the order of the repositories might have changed. Because of
this, we do not want to force using yum-plugin-priorities on all the Gluster
Community users that run on RHEL/CentOS.

In case users still have issues installing the Gluster Community packages on
RHEL or CentOS, we recommend getting in touch with us on the Gluster Users
mailinglist [5] (archive [6]) or in the #gluster IRC channel on Freenode [7].

[1] http://blog.gluster.org/2014/10/glusterfs-3-6-0-is-alive/
[2] http://blog.gluster.org/2014/11/glusterfs-3-5-3beta2-is-now-available-for-testing/
[3] http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/qa-releases/3.5.3beta2/RHEL/glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo
[4] https://access.redhat.com/solutions/881973
[5] gluster-users at gluster.org
[6] http://supercolony.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/
[7] irc://irc.freenode.net/gluster

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