Over the past two weeks, I have done 3 things.
1) I’ve almost migrated everything to VServer guests, with the exception of TWiki. It got slightly complicated when I realised that my ISP doesn’t allow me to have more than 5 internal IP addresses (one for each VServer guests). It’s just weird. So I had to add another router in between the server and the ISP’s router just to fake it. Too bad I also heard from someone that VServer doesn’t do live migration or live backups. Might have more work to do in the future for VServer.
2) Moved this blog to Wordpress, quite glad in a way. Lots to migrate, and new things to learn. It’s an amazing piece of mature blogging application I must say. Too bad that TWiki’s BlogUp wasn’t mature enough, and that I didn’t have the time to help develop it, which was my initial intention. I’ve optimised it to my best knowledge. Haven’t touch the MySQL performance tuning though. Only the Apache and Wordpress itself.
3) I’ve added some new websites on our main page, and awaiting for one site to publically launched in China. The frontpage has been tuned nicely. The load on the server is always high when anyone visits the site, mainly due to the high number of images! So what I did was create a large CSS sprite for all the logos. Works very well. Performance increased at least by 2 folds on this slow Pentium 2 junk. It was tested on this Web Page Analyzer. Don’t think it’s full proof, but it’s doable.
Now that this is done. Next up, upgrading TWiki for development and install Trac. 
I’ve been getting down to quite detail planning and designing lately. Once you have a rough idea, you have to test it out. And this time, I have been testing out GlusterFS on a VServer Guest. The results are very good from the looks of it. Am working on Debian Etch, and they don’t have the required FUSE 2.6.x version for GlusterFS. So I had to grab it off Debian Lenny. I need to install a copy of FUSE as well on the Host machine. This is what I did…
1) Add Lenny deb-src into /etc/apt/sources.list
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian lenny main
2) apt-get update && apt-get build-dep -t lenny fuse-utils – installs additional packages to build fuse-utils
3) apt-get -b source fuse-utils – builds the source
4) apt-get will create 3 .deb files which we need to install using dpkg
- dpkg -i libfuse2_2.6.5-1_i386.deb
- dpkg -i libfuse-dev_2.6.5-1_i386.deb
- dpkg -i fuse-utils_2.6.5-1_i386.deb
5) apt-get will complain when installing fuse-utils. A way around it is to install apt-get install libvolume-id0 udev (or create dummy packages)
Once that’s done, we are ready to head into VServer Guest and install GlusterFS. GlusterFS’ wiki has a good guide for installation.
Note that normal users in Guest will not be able to run GlusterFS because of its requirement for low-level ioctl. So I’ve been told. I partially got it working, but it wasn’t to its full effect. After exchanging some thoughts at #vserver and #glusterfs on freenode, the security risks involved is acceptably minimal.
From this setting, you can pretty much create as many GlusterFS servers and clients as you want and do all your testing or even in production.
Update: Forgot to include one last step.
Update: Leonardo Rodrigues de Mello has built a Debian Etch package for GlusterFS. More information at GlusterFS’ wiki page.
