[Gluster-users] Gluster 3.4.2 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server - Upstart No Go

[Brock Nanson]

Thanks for the thought Matt!  I went through a few different fstab lines
that I found in various gluster configuration howto's and information
pages.  I never did use the noatime option though and played more with
-netdev.  And the lines I used actually all worked if I issued a mount -a
command *after* the boot completed.

The problem comes down to what I think is two things:  First, the gluster
daemon loads but doesn't actually start - at least, querying it after the
boot always resulted in a 'stop/waiting' result, which to me is 'loaded and
ready but not running'.  'Why' could be just about anything and is beyond
my abilities but might be related to waiting for the network interface to
come up... which I think is what mounting-glusterfs.conf is trying to
solve.  So maybe that second conf file is part of the problem... dunno!

The second issue is that the mount seems to fail if you issue the command
right after a 'start' command to gluster.  I had to include a few seconds
of sleep between the commands to get the result I needed.  So it may be
that the upstart conf files manage to delay the start of glusterfs-server
until the interface is up, but the mount is attempted too soon after,
resulting in a fail.  But that doesn't explain why gluster is in the
stop/wait mode...

It's a circular problem one would think, which is why I jumped out of the
loop and came up with my own solution... I'm trying to smoke-test gluster,
not re-invent upstart (which I have grown to loathe by the way... I hadn't
realized init.d was broken! ;-) )

Brock


On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Matt Edwards <matted at mit.edu> wrote:

> I could be completely off-base, but were you trying to mount with noatime?
>
> I ran into a similar problem where, after upgrading to 3.4.2, all my
> client mounts failed.  I discovered (by accident) that it was only due to
> incompatible mount options (namely noatime).  In previous versions, the
> client just gave a warning message about unsupported options, but now it
> fails without mentioning the cause.  I believe there is a bug report for
> this issue (that I discovered afterwards).
>
> Anyways, I thought this had a chance of being the issue, but maybe it's
> something different in your case.
>
> Matt
>
>
>  On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 2:09 PM, Brock Nanson <brock at nanson.net> wrote:
>
>>  I thought I would share my experience in case it helps someone else
>> avoid a bruised forehead.
>>
>> I'm running the semiosis Gluster 3.4.2 on Ubuntu 12.04 (two nodes,
>> replicated) as server and client on both.  Going through all the typical
>> configuration work, all seemed good.  The problem came when I tried to get
>> the boxes to start Gluster and mount the volume at boot... without user
>> intervention.  Thinking that the most difficult part of the installation
>> should be configuring Gluster (newbie to distributed file systems in
>> general, never used Gluster before), I foolishly wasted a pile of time
>> trying to fix the *simple* boot problem.  Well, I did fix it, but only by
>> finally disabling the upstart files bundled in the install
>> (glusterfs-server.conf and mounting-glusterfs.conf).
>>
>> This was a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04.  Actually, two clean installs
>> for testing.  And then another clean install on one box to rule out the
>> original install!  Same behaviour on all installs.
>>
>> I spent some time experimenting with different fstab entries and found I
>> could change the mount behaviour, but only to determine *when* the mount
>> would fail... it always failed!
>>
>> My solution was to disable the two Gluster upstart conf files with
>> .override files containing 'manual'.  Then a simple script to a) start
>> glusterfs-server; b) sleep for a few seconds; c) mount the Gluster volume.
>>  The script is called from rc.local.
>>
>> Hardly an elegant solution I know, but at some point *'works'* beats *'pretty
>> but non-functional'*.
>>
>> It's possible there is something quirky with my install that could be
>> responsible.  But given that other than installing and configuring Gluster,
>> nothing on the servers was tweaked, I'm thinking there is a problem with
>> the Gluster upstart conf files.  Or something in 12.04 has rendered them
>> inoperable. Or maybe it's as a friend in Poland says... (direct
>> translation) "it's the Malice of Things..."  Truly a better description
>> than anything we have in English! ;-)
>>
>> I'm not looking for a solution unless someone has an obvious fix that
>> Google couldn't locate.  I have a quick and dirty work around that works.
>>  I just hope to save someone else the pain.
>>
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>>
>
>
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