[Gluster-users] Working but some issues

[Melkor Lord]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Joe Julian <joe at julianfamily.org> wrote:

I'll split this out as I think you're unaware of the admin guide that's
> pretty detailed and is, at least, published with the source code (it may be
> on the gluster.org site somewhere, but I'm too tired right now to look).
> The source can readily be found on github
> <https://github.com/GlusterFS/glusterfs/tree/master/doc/admin-guide/en-US/markdown>
> .
>

I really think that this github doc (administrator's guide) should be used
directly on gluster.org replacing most, but not all, of the existing doc
because it's clearly more useful (IMHO) than the doc available on site. It
just needs some additions like this -
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Gluster_3.2:_Setting_Volume_Options
- which sysadmins love ! A comprehensive list of options/directives, their
meaning and their default values.

There is useful documentation on gluster.org, mainly the howto's but for
example, I don't think this kind or stuff -
http://www.gluster.org/documentation/architecture/internals/Dougw:A_Newbie%27s_Guide_to_Gluster_Internals/#Configuration_and_Vol_Files
- can help anyone. A bunch of "sample" configs and no pointers to how to
fill them with useful values.

Hint: When you have to use a search engine and type "site:gluster.org nfs"
to reach the link in the first paragraph, something is clearly wrong on how
the documentation is built on site.


> As I said before, I currently have *no* *clue* of all the options and
> directives I can use in the main configuration file
> /etc/glusterfs/glusterd.vol for example!
>
>    Right. There's nearly no need to mess with that except under the
> lesser circumstance that an unprivileged user needs access to the
> management port.
>

If you read my first post -
http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2015-March/021070.html -
especially the point "1/", you'll *why* I had to mess with it. BTW, I also
pointed the inconvenience of using "transport.socket.bind-address" which is
needed in my case but unusable in the current state.

And sorry but "You don't need to mess with that" is not a good answer, this
something for Apple users who "don't want and don't need to know what's
under the hood" :-)

For example, I have no use for "rdma" in my case and want to disable it to
avoid adding bloat to my logs (already huge by default) complaining about
not being able to initialize it.



>  That is the way it's done, btw. The developers are required to document
> their features before a release.
>

Ok so where's the doc for the features for "glusterd.vol" ? :-)


>   Let me take 2 real world examples to get the general idea : Postfix and
> NGinX! They are flexible enough to provide a quite large set of use cases.
> Their documentation is impeccable from my point of view. They provide an
> exhaustive documentation of their inner options like this -
> http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html - and this -
> http://nginx.org/en/docs/dirindex.html
>
>
> Postfix, 16 years old, and hasn't always had very detailed documentation.
> Do you also remember when it was worse than sendmail's?
>

I used postfix when its version was 1999MMDD :-) It took these examples to
demonstrate that they are comprehensive despite their visual awfulness.
Docs like Apache or PHP or Python are way more appealing for the eye of the
reader. The point was : First provide exhaustive documentation, then add
eye candy.

For instance, the markdown docs available on GitHub are a very good balance
between these goals.


>
> I could counter with any of the myriad of horrible documentation for some
> of the most popular software systems out there only to point out that
> Gluster's isn't all that bad by comparison to a great many of its peers.
>

I'm not putting a trial on gluster, don't take me wrong. The biggest issue
I have is with the way documentation is available. Now that I browsed a lot
of it I get a clearer view of the big picture. Currently, it is available
at 3 distinct places, here - http://www.gluster.org/documentation/ - here -
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Gluster_3.2_Filesystem_Administration_Guide
and finally here -
https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/tree/master/doc/admin-guide/en-US/markdown
which does not really help anyone discovering the project.

Mixing various information available on each site allowed me to get
GlusterFS work reasonably well for my needs except for the SSL part (but
given the SSL markdown doc, I think I know how to solve my issue, I still
have to test)


> To the very specific case of "--remote-host" option, there's a design
> problem in "gluster" command. Launching it without arguments and you get a
> prompt and the command completion helps a bit. Now, try "gluster -h" (or
> --help or -? or whatever) and you end up with "unrecognized option --XXX".
> This is counter intuitive again. You can't experiment by trial and error to
> figure out things when you're in the dark, that's why I had to take a peek
> to the source code and find out the existence of other options.
>
>
> "gluster help" is pretty intuitive, imho, as is
>
>     # gluster
>     gluster> help
>
> and the more detailed than any other software I can think of, "gluster
> volume set help" which has all the settings you can tweak in your volume
> along with their description equivalent to that postfix document.
>

You missed the point here. Yep, "gluster help" works nicely and is quite
helpful but I was talking about the options for "gluster" itself,
independently of any command!

You *HAVE* to look here -
https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/cli/src/cli.c#L303 - to
find out that "gluster" accepts "--version", "--print-logdir",
"--remote-host=", etc, etc. This is not documented elsewhere AFAIK.


>   If you spend so much time trying to find information instead of
> experimenting with a project, you may grow bored and leave.
>
>
> Agreed, and that's something that the gluster.org web site's been failing
> at since the last 1 or 2 web site revamps.
>

I think a third (maybe the right one this time) is need to gather all
scattered documentation, remove the not-so-useful stuff and add
documentation for what's missing.


> For example, I can't get SSL to work with my 3.6.2 setup and there's not a
> single bit of doc about it. There's only
> http://blog.gluster.org/author/zbyszek/ but even after following the
> necessary steps, I end up with a cryptic log entry "Cannot authenticate
> client from fs-00-22666-2015/03/16-11:42:54:167984-Data-client-0-0-0 3.6.2"
> and repeated for all the replicas :-( I don't know what GlusterFS expects
> in this case so I can't solve the problem for now.
>
>
>
> https://github.com/GlusterFS/glusterfs/blob/master/doc/admin-guide/en-US/markdown/admin_ssl.md
> <-- not a blog
>

That's the result of scattered information. I spent so much time searching
for glusterd.vol information, and had to deal with the
"transport.socket.bind-address" issue that I simply missed that one. I
confess having spent most of my time within here -
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Gluster_3.2_Filesystem_Administration_Guide
- and here - http://www.gluster.org/documentation/

Trust me to thoroughly read this SSL markdown doc to try to solve my issue
:-)



>  Useful and eloquent perspectives and bits that infra is looking at
> rectifying. The web site is covered in too many words. The "Getting
> Started" entry has 13 sub-entries. That's not "getting started" that's
> "tl;dr". A new vision is being put together that will try to not just build
> a fancy web thingy, but will define goals such as usability, engagement,
> community interfacing, that kind of stuff - and measure the effectiveness
> of the changes that are made. It'll be change for the sake of improvement
> rather than just change for the sake of change.
>

I wish you the best of luck on that because I know what writing doc means,
it's an unfair job. I sometimes have to write doc, mainly tutorials with
screen captures, for users who never read it and complain the usual "it
doesn't work" BS. At least you'll be luckier with GlusterFS because your
target audience is technically skilled people who know they have to
actually read docs to make things work :-)


>  But I still say you should still document things you find in the source
> if they aren't documented - since you're in there anyway. :-D
>

As mentioned earlier, I indeed had to browse the source code to find the
options of the "gluster" command. I agree there are obvious options and
it's no rocket science to guess what their arguments are but for others, I
wouldn't roll the dice to "guess" what it does. Documentation is far too
important to be messed with :-D


-- 
Unix _IS_ user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20150318/f93c256c/attachment.html>