Lustre discuss - May 2006 - understanding lustre: typical newbie problems (IMHO)

Hallo *,

I am pretty unexperienced to lustre, I try to get my
ideas to work and I''m stuck. 

GOAL:

My wish configuration is 
FC SAN shared disk phisically connected over two hba''s 
(using multipath) to two servers 
(SuSE SLES9 SP2, lustre-lite 1.2.6, kernel 2.6.5) 
and partitioned with lvm2.
The nodes create a cluster, and for now on I do not need
no other servers to connect to the cluster FS, so the nodes
should simultaneously act as OSS, MDS and clients.

DONE:

Till now I:
- configured SAN,
- configured HBA''s,
- set up multipath,
- configured LVM2,
- implemented and successful mounted
  the partition of type lustre_lite on the first node.

TODO:

After I read the FAQ and HOWTO some of my questions are still
unanswered:

- how to tell lustre to share the partition between two OSS ?
  (it means: "do not format after you set it up on second node")
- how to tell lustre "add host test2 as stand-by MDS 
  of existing MDS of host called test1". 
- how to manually switch the service of active MDS and OSS 
  to stand-by node ?
  (for maintenance purposes, i.e.)
- which ports are used by lustre for interconnnect
  communication ? (iptables related question)
- which is the difference between the terms "lustrefs" 
  (from lustre''s docs) and "lustre_lite" (FS type from      
  SuSE''s /etc/mtab )?

I found the lustre-provided documentation unsufficient for my case.

KINDLY REQUEST:

Could you help me to understand lustre (my main goal) and to set up a
small system without any or with as less as possible SPOFs for
educational purposes ? (my incidental goal).

BTW:
Is the printed above list of lacking configuration steps complete ?

Any help will be VERY appreciated.

Regards,
mpr.

-- 
Marcin Przyczyna
it/org
http://www.citiworks.de/
+49 89 9925 75356
mpr@citiworks.de