[Gluster-users] Gluster FS Native Client Behaviour (3.7)

[Peter Spain]

Hello

I am very new to GlusterFS and have been playing around with over the last
few weeks, with a view to using it in production. So far I found Gluster to
be very interesting and easy to get along with. However, there seems to be
a giant hole where the Gluster Native Client documentation should live.

After using it for a few weeks and playing around (inside various VMs) I am
still not entirely sure how the client behaves.

>From network captures it is clear that the client communicates to all the
nodes for a particular volume, and that the client gets this information
from a volfile (which it retrieves when mounting a volume). Various blog
posts confirm this and go on to mention that the client is responsible for
replicating data across nodes, and not the nodes themselves. I assume this
is still the case?

Beyond that I really have no idea how the client behaves in a replicated
volume. My questions are:

There is a "ping-timeout" option to adjust how long it takes the client to
connect to a different node, in case of node failure. If the client knows
about all nodes and actively communicates with all of them, why does it
need a time out at all?

Why does the client "stick" to a particular node?

Does the client go back to the original node once it recovers?

Is it possible to dictate which node a client will initially connect to on
mounting a volume?

If all this information is contained in some documentation I would love to
be pointed to it, as so far I cannot find the answer to these questions.

Regards

Peter
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