After spending several months running user home directories under GlusterFS, we have encountered some minor problems of files that get modified or unmodified in a seemingly random fashion. This might be due to us using Gluster in an unsupported way.
Therefore, we decided to switch to a tried and true method – storing home user directories under NFS.
In the intervening months, we had upgraded our entire office network to a gigabit network and purchased a new dedicated file-server. Therefore, we were well set to move onto a NFS based system. To prevent some negative effects of network delays, we employed CacheFS too.
# aptitude install cachefilesd nfs-common
After installation, the configuration file needed to be edited.
# nano /etc/defaults/cachefilesd
RUN=yes
Then, cachefilesd was started and the NFS share mounted.
# /etc/init.d/cachefilesd start
# mount -t nfs server:/share /home
Turns out to work quite well for the moment. It was even possible to log into the multiple systems concurrently although this would be discouraged. CacheFS seems to be working too as we can see a lot of random files in the file cache directory.
As for Gluster, we’ve decided to use it in the back-end to synchronise files across file-servers in a form of network RAID1.
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