Options for synchronising filesystems
Eric Anderson
anderson at centtech.com
Mon Sep 26 05:46:16 PDT 2005
filip wuytack wrote:
>
>
> Eric Anderson wrote:
>
>> Brian Candler wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I was wondering if anyone would care to share their experiences in
>>> synchronising filesystems across a number of nodes in a cluster. I
>>> can think
>>> of a number of options, but before changing what I'm doing at the
>>> moment I'd
>>> like to see if anyone has good experiences with any of the others.
>>>
>>> The application: a clustered webserver. The users' CGIs run in a chroot
>>> environment, and these clearly need to be identical (otherwise a CGI
>>> running
>>> on one box would behave differently when running on a different box).
>>> Ultimately I'd like to synchronise the host OS on each server too.
>>>
>>> Note that this is a single-master, multiple-slave type of filesystem
>>> synchronisation I'm interested in.
>>>
>>>
>>> 1. Keep a master image on an admin box, and rsync it out to the
>>> frontends
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>
>>> This is what I'm doing at the moment. Install a master image in
>>> /webroot/cgi, add packages there (chroot /webroot/cgi pkg_add ...), and
>>> rsync it. [Actually I'm exporting it using NFS, and the frontends run
>>> rsync
>>> locally when required to update their local copies against the NFS
>>> master]
>>>
>>> Disadvantages:
>>>
>>> - rsyncing a couple of gigs of data is not particularly fast, even
>>> when only
>>> a few files have changed
>>>
>>> - if a sysadmin (wrongly) changes a file on a front-end instead of on
>>> the
>>> master copy in the admin box, then the change will be lost when the next
>>> rsync occurs. They might think they've fixed a problem, and then
>>> (say) 24
>>> hours later their change is wiped. However if this is a config file, the
>>> fact that the old file has been reinstated might not be noticed until
>>> the
>>> daemon is restarted or the box rebooted - maybe months later. This I
>>> think
>>> is the biggest fundamental problem.
>>>
>>> - files can be added locally and they will remain indefinitely
>>> (unless we
>>> use rsync --delete which is a bit scary). If this is done then adding
>>> a new
>>> machine into the cluster by rsyncing from the master will not pick up
>>> these
>>> extra files.
>>>
>>> So, here are the alternatives I'm considering, and I'd welcome any
>>> additional suggestions too.
>>
>>
>>
>> Here's a few ideas on this: do multiple rsyncs, one for each top level
>> directory. That might speed up your total rsync process. Another
>> similar method is using a content revisioning system. This is only
>> good for some cases, but something like subversion might work ok here.
>>
>>
>>
>>> 2. Run the images directly off NFS
>>> ----------------------------------
>>>
>>> I've had this running before, even the entire O/S, and it works just
>>> fine.
>>> However the NFS server itself then becomes a critical
>>> single-point-of-failure: if it has to be rebooted and is out of
>>> service for
>>> 2 minutes, then the whole cluster is out of service for that time.
>>>
>>> I think this is only feasible if I can build a highly-available NFS
>>> server,
>>> which really means a pair of boxes serving the same data. Since the
>>> system
>>> image is read-only from the point of view of the frontends, this
>>> should be
>>> easy enough:
>>>
>>> frontends frontends
>>> | | | | | |
>>> NFS -----------> NFS
>>> server 1 sync server 2
>>>
>>> As far as I know, NFS clients don't support the idea of failing over
>>> from
>>> one server to another, so I'd have to make a server pair which
>>> transparently
>>> fails over.
>>>
>>> I could make one NFS server take over the other server's IP address
>>> using
>>> carp or vrrp. However, I suspect that the clients might notice. I
>>> know that
>>> NFS is 'stateless' in the sense that a server can be rebooted, but for a
>>> client to be redirected from one server to the other, I expect that
>>> these
>>> filesytems would have to be *identical*, down to the level of the inode
>>> numbers being the same.
>>>
>>> If that's true, then rsync between the two NFS servers won't cut it.
>>> I was
>>> thinking of perhaps using geom_mirror plus ggated/ggatec to make a
>>> block-identical read-only mirror image on NFS server 2 - this also
>>> has the
>>> advantage that any updates are close to instantaneous.
>>>
>>> What worries me here is how NFS server 2, which has the mirrored
>>> filesystem
>>> mounted read-only, will take to having the data changed under its
>>> nose. Does
>>> it for example keep caches of inodes in memory, and what would happen if
>>> those inodes on disk were to change? I guess I can always just
>>> unmount and
>>> remount the filesystem on NFS server 2 after each change.
>>
>>
>>
>> I've tried doing something similar. I used fiber attached storage,
>> and had multiple hosts mounting the same partition. It seemed as
>> though when host A mounted the filesystem read-write, and then host B
>> mounted it read-only, any changes made by host A were not seen by B,
>> and even remounting did not always bring it up to current state. I
>> believe it has to do with the buffer cache and host A's desire to keep
>> things (like inode changes, block maps, etc) in cache and not write
>> them to disk. FreeBSD does not currently have a multi-system cache
>> coherency protocol to distribute that information to other hosts.
>> This is something I think would be very useful for many people. I
>> suppose you could just mount the filesystem when you know a change has
>> happened, but you still may not see the change. Maybe mounting the
>> filesystem on host A with the sync option would help.
>>
>>> My other concern is about susceptibility to DoS-type attacks: if one
>>> frontend were to go haywire and start hammering the NFS servers
>>> really hard,
>>> it could impact on all the other machines in the cluster.
>>>
>>> However, the problems of data synchronisation are solved: any change
>>> made on
>>> the NFS server is visible identically to all front-ends, and
>>> sysadmins can't
>>> make changes on the front-ends because the NFS export is read-only.
>>
>>
>>
>> This was my first thought too, and a highly available NFS server is
>> something any NFS heavy installation wants (needs). There are a few
>> implementations of clustered filesystems out there, but non for
>> FreeBSD (yet). What that allows is multiple machines talking to a
>> shared storage with read/write access. Very handy, but since you only
>> need read-only access, I think your problem is much simpler, and you
>> can get away with a lot less.
>>
>>
>>> 3. Use a network distributed filesystem - CODA? AFS?
>>> ----------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> If each frontend were to access the filesystem as a read-only network
>>> mount,
>>> but have a local copy to work with in the case of disconnected
>>> operation,
>>> then the SPOF of an NFS server would be eliminated.
>>>
>>> However, I have no experience with CODA, and although it's been in
>>> the tree
>>> since 2002, the README's don't inspire confidence:
>>>
>>> "It is mostly working, but hasn't been run long enough to be sure
>>> all the
>>> bugs are sorted out. ... This code is not SMP ready"
>>>
>>> Also, a local cache is no good if the data you want during disconnected
>>> operation is not in the cache at that time, which I think means this
>>> idea is
>>> not actually a very good one.
>>
>>
>>
>> There is also a port for coda. I've been reading about this, and
>> it's an interesting filesystem, but I'm just not sure of it's
>> usefulness yet.
>>
>>
>>> 4. Mount filesystems read-only
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> On each front-end I could store /webroot/cgi on a filesystem mounted
>>> read-only to prevent tampering (as long as the sysadmin doesn't
>>> remount it
>>> read-write of course). That would work reasonably well, except that
>>> being
>>> mounted read-only I couldn't use rsync to update it!
>>>
>>> It might also work with geom_mirror and ggated/ggatec, except for the
>>> issue
>>> I raised before about changing blocks on a filesystem under the nose
>>> of a
>>> client who is actively reading from it.
>>
>>
>>
>> I suppose you could mount r/w only when doing the rsync, then switch
>> back to ro once complete. You should be able to do this online,
>> without any issues or taking the filesystem offline.
>>
>>
>>> 5. Using a filesystem which really is read-only
>>> -----------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> Better tamper-protection could be had by keeping data in a filesystem
>>> structure which doesn't support any updates at all - such as cd9660 or
>>> geom_uzip.
>>>
>>> The issue here is how to roll out a new version of the data. I could
>>> push
>>> out a new filesystem image into a second partition, but it would then be
>>> necessary to unmount the old filesystem and remount the new on the same
>>> place, and you can't really unmount a filesystem which is in use. So
>>> this
>>> would require a reboot.
>>>
>>> I was thinking that some symlink trickery might help:
>>>
>>> /webroot/cgi -> /webroot/cgi1
>>> /webroot/cgi1 # filesystem A mounted here
>>> /webroot/cgi2 # filesystem B mounted here
>>>
>>> It should be possible to unmount /webroot/cgi2, dd in a new image,
>>> remount
>>> it, and change the symlink to point to /webroot/cgi2. After a little
>>> while,
>>> hopefully all the applications will stop using files in
>>> /webroot/cgi1, so
>>> this one can be unmounted and a new one put in its place on the next
>>> update.
>>> However this is not guaranteed, especially if there are long-lived
>>> processes
>>> using binary images in this partition. You'd still have to stop and
>>> restart
>>> all those processes.
>>>
>>> If reboots were acceptable, then the filesystem image could also be
>>> stored
>>> in ramdisk pulled in via pxeboot. This makes sense especially for
>>> geom_uzip
>>> where the data is pre-compressed. However I would still prefer to avoid
>>> frequent reboots if at all possible. Also, whilst a ramdisk might be
>>> OK for
>>> the root filesystem, a typical CGI environment (with perl, php, ruby,
>>> python, and loads of libraries) would probably be too large anyway.
>>>
>>>
>>> 6. Journaling filesystem replication
>>> ------------------------------------
>>>
>>> If the data were stored on a journaling filesystem on the master box,
>>> and
>>> the journal logs were distributed out to the slaves, then they would all
>>> have identical filesystem copies and only a minimal amount of data would
>>> need to be pushed out to each machine on each change. (This would be
>>> rather
>>> like NetApps and their snap-mirroring system). However I'm not aware
>>> of any
>>> journaling filesystem for FreeBSD, let alone whether it would support
>>> filesystem replication in this way.
>>
>>
>>
>> There is a project underway for UFSJ (UFS journaling). Maybe once it
>> is complete, and bugs are ironed out, one could implement a journal
>> distribution piece to send the journal updates to multiple hosts and
>> achieve what you are thinking, however, that only distributes the
>> meta-data, and not the actual data.
>>
>>
> Have a look at dragonfly BSD for this. They are working on a journaling
> filesystem that will do just that.
Do you have a link to some information on this? I've been looking at
Dragonfly, but I'm having trouble finding good information on what is
already working, in planning, etc.
Eric
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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