[Gluster-users] GFID mismatches and tools to fix them

[Vikas Gorur]

Hi everyone,

As some of you may know, the presence of files/directories which have
different GFID's on different backends can cause the GlusterFS client to
throw up errors, or even hang. Among others, we've had users of Enomaly
affected by this issue.

A little background on GFIDs:

Each file/directory on a Gluster volume has a unique 128-bit number
associated with it called the GFID. This is true regardless of Gluster
configuration (distribute or distribute/replicate). One inode, one GFID.

The GFID is stored on the backend as the value of the extended attribute
"trusted.gfid". Under normal circumstances, the value of this attribute is
the same on all the backend bricks. However, certain conditions can cause
the value on one or more of the bricks to differ from that on the other
bricks. This causes the GlusterFS client to become confused and throw up
errors. This applies to both the 3.1.5 and 3.2.1 versions of the filesystem,
and previous versions in those series.

In a future bugfix release GlusterFS will fix this issue automatically when
it detects it. Until then, if you encounter this problem, please use the
following set of tools to manually fix it on the backends:

https://github.com/vikasgorur/gfid

The repository contains the tools as well as a README that explains how to
use them.

Your questions and comments are welcome.

-- 
Vikas Gorur
Engineer - Gluster
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