Man Page Bugs

Just noticed CentOS5 has a man page bug and may not be the only disto to have it as when I google for the same man page I get similar results.

Compare man mkfs.ext3 to http://man-wiki.net/index.php/8:mkfs.ext3

You will notice the following is missing:

-I inode-size

Specify the inode size. The default inode-size used by mke2fs is 128. inode-size can be 128, 256, 512 or

1024. This value generally shouldn't be changed!

It almost led me to recreate a filesystem with the wrong option as I did not believe GlusterFS docs would be more complete than my current distros.

RedHat Installer aka Anaconda

What an annoying inflexible tool! It reminds me of Windows in it's methodology e.g. abstract everything from the user so that he doesn't have to know anything, hide real problems from the user so he doesn't know whats broken and then won't worry, stop the user from being able to manually setup anything so he can never fix any problems that occur from the automated fashion the installer uses. What happened to the rescue shell that used to start back in the day giving you some flexibility? What happened to the option of loading another driver at install time from supplemental CD/DVD or the Internet? What happened to the ability to partition using fdisk or something seperate from the anaconda script?

IMHO all this type of thing breeds is a new type of Linux admin very similar to a Windows admin of late who can only follow others step by step work and heavily reliant on Wizards and management GUIs while pissing off the experience Open Source community members who are forced to use distributions like these because of their support structure and market share.

CentOS 5 GFS Install

I have decided to include the steps I felt I needed to take to make a test install of GFS before I decided not to use it. It doesn't cover clvm configuration but it's very similar to LVM2 which is well documented on the net so I decided not to include it here.

#NTP is needed on every node in the cluster sync'd to the same place of course
yum -y install ntp
#Needed for gfs clustering
yum -y groupinstall Clustering
#GFS kernel module and FS utils
yum -y install gfs-kmod
yum -y install gfs-utils

#Needed to get the stupid system-config-cluster running for configuration of the cluster
yum -y install xorg-x11-xauth xorg-x11-fonts-base xorg-x11-fonts-Type1

#NTP is needed on every node in the cluster sync'd to the same place of course
chkconfig ntpd on
service ntpd start

#Stop updatedb trawling our gfs mounts
echo 'PRUNEFS = "auto afs iso9660 sfs udf"
PRUNEPATHS = "/afs /media /net /sfs /tmp /udev /var/spool/cups /var/spool/squid /var/tmp /cvp /mnt/cvp /media"' > /etc/updatedb.conf

# Create the filesystem with 125 journals(nodes) clustername coull and fs name cvp on /dev/hdb
gfs_mkfs -p lock_dlm -t coull:cvp -j 125 /dev/hdb

#config /etc/cluster/cluster.conf using system-config-cluster by throwing the x connection back to your machine via SSH

#add cluster hosts to /etc/hosts not DNS as this introduces a point of failure and some slowdown.

#Start clustering and GFS services
service cman start
service clvmd start
service gfs start

#Mount SAN device which should be a clv (centralised logical volume)
mount -t gfs /dev/san1/lvol0 /san -o noatime

# Memcache anyone?  Not sure what the options are for yet as I've never set it up before
/usr/bin/memcached -d -m 512 -l 192.168.2.100 -p 11211 -u nobody