[Gluster-users] gluster volume create failure

[Brian Candler]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 08:56:02PM +0200, John Smith wrote:
> Thanks. Is there a preferred naming convention to go along with it ?

It's up to you, but I used /exports/brick1/myvol, /exports/brick2/myvol
and it seemed logical to me.

There's an important benefit to doing this. If the filesystem doesn't mount
for any reason at startup, then you are left with an empty /exports/brick1
mount point.  glusterd sees that /exports/brick1/myvol is not present and so
glusterd terminates.  This is what you want.

If you had used /exports/brick1 as the brick then glusterd would start up,
see the empty directory, and if it's part of a replicated volume would start
self-healing data into it - potentially filling up your root filesystem very
quickly!

Another side benefit is that you can if you wish re-use the same filesystem
as a member of multiple volumes. For example

/exports/brick1/myvol
might be part of a replicated volume, and
/exports/brick1/othervol
might be part of a distributed volume.

This can be simpler and easier to manage than using something like LVM to
slice up your brick, although the volume "free space" you see may not work
quite how you expect.

Regards,

Brian.