[HCoop-Discuss] Reorganizing, people-wise and tech-wise

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 08:33:03PM -0400, François-Denis Gonthier wrote:
> (This message was originally sent with the wrong address, pardon to the
> moderator)
> 
> > 
> > They have a single fileserver which store all the data and you can
> > simple log into any of the diskless servers and find the same
> > environment. These servers just provide CPU power and the filesystem
> > server provides the storage.
> > 
> > You could load balance, do cloud computing (like Google App Engine or
> > so), and you don't have a single point of failure, so if one server
> > goes down (except the fileserver), the members can simply use one of
> > the others. Moreover, new services don't have to be distributed to
> > the server (like http, smtp, imap or pop), because they operate on
> > the same set of data, this saves a lot of administration work and is
> > more flexible. You could simply PnP new servers.
> 
> This must work wonders if with several servers in the same data
> center.  I'm less sure how it would work for a distributed system that
> spans the globe.  Before you cite some example of distributed FS setup,
> make sure you also say how a cooperative organization with no paid
> staff can manage it.

All the server will be in one data centre as far as I understood it and
they will be linked with fast connections, so I don't see a problem.

> I'm against switching to yet another file system.  One of the reason
> Adam cited is that it limits the number of people able to do
> administration.  That means that unless you have a contract for life
> with HCOOP, we may end up in the same situation in a few years if
> you decide to move on to something else.

NFS is pretty common these days. It would be a bigger problem if we
choose some more exotic filesystem which is not part of the kernel yet.
We could also use GFS if someone is familiar with this.