This has been tested using the most recent build of 3.1.2 (built Jan 18 2011 11:19:54) System setup: Volume Name: brick Type: Distributed-Replicate Status: Started Number of Bricks: 2 x 2 = 4 Transport-type: tcp Bricks: Brick1: linguest2:/data/exp Brick2: linguest3:/data/exp Brick3: linguest4:/data/exp Brick4: linguest5:/data/exp This scenario is to remove both linguest4, linguest5 from the volume. The command below is run to remove the two machines. gluster volume remove-brick brick linguest4:/data/exp linguest5:/data/exp Removing brick(s) can result in data loss. Do you want to Continue? (y/n) y Remove Brick successful As soon as the above is run and completed I now get this log every 3 seconds. [2011-02-09 10:28:43.957955] E [afr-common.c:2602:afr_notify] brick-replicate-1: All subvolumes are down. Going offline until atleast one of them comes back up. That log will continue until i log onto all other machines and umount,mount the gluster mount point. Also now that the two bricks have been removed there is data missing even though the documentation states "Distributed replicated volumes replicate (mirror) data across two or more nodes in the cluster" so I would have expected all the data to still be available. The only difference with this setup is that the initial setup just had linguest2 and linguest3 then linguest4 and linguest5 were added later. Thanks Nick