FAQ
Scalable, Lightweight, Archival Storage Hierarchy, version 2. SLASH2 preserves the legacy naming of an earlier incarnation of a parallel file system that was written tailored for different requirements.
FUSE stands for File system in UserSpacE. It is a interface for writing file systems for use by Linux without running in kernel mode. It has been ported to a variety of UNIX like systems such as FreeBSD and Solaris. As the SLASH2 client uses FUSE, our client software runs on any system FUSE works on.
Well known related projects include Lustre-WAN, GPFS, Gluster, XtreemFS, Ceph.
- No support for file access time (st_atime).
- No support for mandatory file locking (flock(2)) or advisory locking (lockf(3)).
- No support for access control lists
All major file system features exposed to the user are accessible via the msctl interface.
Certain administration controls, such as bandwidth reservation policies, workload prioritization, etc. are additionally available via the slictl and slmctl.
A SLASH2 deployment, in order to be useful, must have an MDS server and at least one I/O system and at least one client. Additional clients, I/O systems, and even MDS nodes can be added to any SLASH2 deployment but this is the minimal configuration necessary for basic file system functionality.
This questions has different answers depending on the deployment components.
- MDS: Linux only
- IOS: Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac
- CLI: Linux, BSD, Mac
Yes, SLASH2 is fully licensed under GPLv2. The PSC File system Library (PFL), a dependency of SLASH2, is licensed under ISC.
PFL is the PSC File system Library. It contains data structures, system interface compatibilities, portability, code abstractions, etc. for SLASH2 and other file systems.
At this time, because of the primitive security model implemented in SLASH2, it is not possible to connect nodes behind internal networks to nodes outside. All SLASH2 peers on a deployment must address each other universally.
I am configuring my firewall for my SLASH2 deployment; what is the networking/communication behavior of the various SLASH2 actors?
One configurable TCP port must be open for inbound and outbound access among all participating SLASH2 peers. This means all MDS, IOS, and client nodes must be configured for inbound and outbound TCP access on a selected port.
Slash2 supports UID/GID mappings. It will support Kerberos in the future.
See man pages of slash2 specific tools (i.e., msctl, slictl, and slmctl).
Please see the following document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CNULVXrltMBdYQ3SyizROc73O_qBSaB0AJgUtFim6ms/edit#
