[Pvfs2-developers] RFC: Config file overhaul

[Julian Martin Kunkel]

Hi,
> We were thinking of going about solving this in a 3 step process.
This is really cool ;)
I  think it might be a good idea to thing about the zero conf issue and about 
extending the server farm during this process. This actually might not be  
much more efford to think about it and make plans for it so that you can 
later add another step to get to a zeroconf (extending) environment...
Concearning zeroconf a "<StorageSpace>" tag in the normal fs.conf I think is 
no good idea... The information of handle ranges and available servers should 
be maintained separately from the input of the sysadmin. For simplicity it 
could be generated on the fly by the rootserver, though... I mean so you 
could do something like giving each new server 1 million handles the first 
time it is added and later give another amount once the million is used up...
(Once it is assigned it has to be stored of course...)

>To continue the discussion here that I had offline with Murali, what  
>about having servers send an initial hello message to the master  
>server, so that they don't have to figure out what port to listen  
>on?  The master can send that server's HostID, wait for a ready  
>response, and then push the config file to that endpoint.
That sounds good. You still have to give a address of the rootserver to the 
non-rootservers, right ? Then it figures out which network it has to use for 
the first-contact :)

>>For instance server
>>(non root) restarts should cause putconfig's implicitly or getconfig's?
>To continue the discussion here that I had offline with Murali, what  
>about having servers send an initial hello message to the master  
>server, so that they don't have to figure out what port to listen  
>on?  The master can send that server's HostID, wait for a ready  
>response, and then push the config file to that endpoint
Cool, this seems to be a good idea. 
The other servers once they come up contact the rootserver for a new config 
the server implicitly gets their current used network address, the rootserver 
then could generate a new entry with that address... 
Once the admin changes global parameters a putconfig to all servers is 
necessary, of course. Also, if a new metaserver is added the client config is 
invalid, but not necessarily if a new dataserver is added...

I really like all the stuff ;)

Have a nice day,
Julian