gluster-zeroconf is project that provides an autodiscovery mechanism for Gluster Storage Servers. It uses Avahi to register a GlusterD service, and provides gluster-discovery that can be used to display the storage servers that announce themselves.

Installation

The recommended installation method is though RPMs. Building the RPMs is trivial:

$ python setup.py sdist
$ rpmbuild -ta dist/gluster-zeroconf-0.1.0.tar.gz

Usage

1. On a storage server that should become discoverable, install the gluster-zeroconf-avahi RPM. This will automatically pull in the avahi package as well. Avahi should haveb be enabled after it got installed.

2. On at least one storage server, install the python-gluster-zeroconf RPM. This package provides the gluster-discovery tool.

After installation, run gluster-discovery to list the storage servers that announce themselves. It is possible to let gluster-discovery do a gluster peer probe for all discovered servers with:

\# gluster-discovery probe

Limitations

Avahi uses the Zeroconf protocols (multicat DNS/DNS-SD) for service announcement and discovery. For this to work, multicast needs to be available on the (local) network. There are most likely limitations in public/private cloud environments and networks that span multiple subnets.

TODO

This project has just started as a proof-of-concept and there are many improvements possible. The following is a list in no particular order:

• filter servers that do not need gluster peer probe
• report a warning for a failed gluster peer probe
• resolve the hostnames of the discovered storage servers
• ...