[Gluster-users] RPi (or something similar) cluster and GlusterFS - feedback?

[Philip Rhoades]

People,

For many years (after some nasty experiences) I have been in the habit 
of using a Fedora Work Station (which stays on but gets rebooted fairly 
frequently) and a separate Fedora server (email-MTA, some Web sites etc) 
which stays on for very long periods of time and only gets rebooted 
infrequently.  I have other systems that get booted occasionally.  My 
habit has been to backup / rsync important / critical data between the 
regular WS and the main server as appropriate - this has allowed me on a 
number of occasions to recover happily when hardware has failed, to get 
going temporarily again on one or the other machine while I sort out the 
problem.

More recently I have been thinking about building an ARM cluster with 
Gluster that would hold all the data for both the WS and the main server 
and any other WSs or servers I might need to run from time to time.  I 
would still make use of an off-site backup anyway but I like the idea of 
just being able to add another ARM device + SATA drive to the cluster to 
create more data space.  I also thought I would go back to making use of 
WSs that were basically just X-servers that booted from some sort of USB 
stick but got the OS image from the cluster - this might be complicated 
by the fact I now use Sway rather than X - but one problem at a time . .

Has anyone here set up a cluster something like this?  Have people any 
suggestions about specific (Fedora) web pages / docs to look at?

I have been tracking CEPH for some time and while it looks interesting, 
it seems overkill for what I am thinking of doing and more technically 
difficult to support / debug etc.  I am thinking of starting the 
exercise with 4 RPis each with an 8Tb SATA drive.

Thanks,

Phil.
-- 
Philip Rhoades

PO Box 896
Cowra  NSW  2794
Australia
E-mail:  phil at pricom.com.au