GlusterFS VFS module for Samba 3.6.x

THIS PROJECT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED

Our goal is to provide a seamless experience sharing GlusterFS volumes over SMB to all clients. This means leveraging Samba’s VFS (Virtual FileSystem) layer’s capabilities to bypass the filesystem layer and talk to GlusterFS as a directly-accessed object store.

From Wikipedia:

Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking
protocol, originally developed by Andrew Tridgell. As of version 3, Samba
provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and
can integrate with a Windows Server domain, either as a Primary Domain
Controller (PDC) or as a domain member. It can also be part of an Active
Directory domain.

This project exists to provide an independent development space for a VFS module known as vfs_glusterfs, and is focused on integration with Samba version 3.6.9^[1]. Another version of vfs_glusterfs exists in the master Samba branch^[2] which is focused on integration with the latest and greatest version of Samba.

^[1] Samba 3.6.9

^[2] Master Samba branch

Compiling

1. Download and unpack a Samba source tree. Usually you want to get a Samba git repository and checkout the "v3-6-test" branch.

2. Run "./configure" from the /path/to/samba_dir/source3 directory

3. ./autogen.sh

4. ./configure --with-samba-source=/path/to/samba_dir/source3

   1. Optional/useful configure options:

      --with-glusterfs  Path to the parent directory containing the
                        GlusterFS installation to build against.
      --with-fhs        Are we using Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
                        compliant paths?
      --prefix          Installation prefix. (e.g. "/usr")

5. make

Installing

1. make install

2. Start/Restart Samba

Clean-up

1. make clean
   Removes build files.

2. make distclean
   Removes any files generated from all the above commands, including the Makefile.

Usage

When defining a share in smb.conf, the following options are required for sharing a GlusterFS volume:

[sharename]
vfs object = glusterfs     # Load the VFS module
glusterfs:volume = volname # GlusterFS volume to share
path = /                   # Path relative to the root of the
                           # GlusterFS volume.

Other useful configuration options:

glusterfs:loglevel = 2       # Logging level
glusterfs:logfile = /tmp/foo # Path to log file