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.