Making GFS available to Nodes

A big misunderstanding with GFS is that it is a network aware filesystem. Actually, you still need something to get the date from the server to the clients. For RHEL5, that something is GNBD... For anything newer than FC4... Its something else?

Assuming you have a two node RHEL 5 cluster, with a GFS file system presented to one node, we will now make it visible to a second node. First, load the needed packages:

yum install gnbd_utils

Turns out this process is not as well automated as most services. My guess is that this is a temporary solution, most likely to be replaced with iSCSI.

On the server side (side with the GFS volume), append to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

gndb_serv
gndb_export -t /dev/gfs/test -e shared

Make sure the volume name on the server is unique and not VolGoup00 or vg0.

On the client side, append to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

modprobe gndb
gndb_import -i gfs1.terran.lan

In this example, we exported an LVM, so we'll do a vgsan to see it.