[Lustre-discuss] How to start

[Rayentray Tappa]

Hi List,
I'm working for a small government organization in South America, and in
our quest for a large distributed storage solution we ran across Lustre.
We have some servers in which we're trying to build a prototype to
decide whether or not Lustre meets our requirements. 
Because of some hardware issues we've temporarily chosen RHEL5 as our OS
but will also give Debian a try later (so I might bug you later on
building Lustre from sources, but that will be another era).
Right now we are trying to build a Lustre filesystem with 4 servers: 2
of them as MDS/MDT configured for failover, and the other two as OSS
with one and two OST respectively.
I've already installed the patched kernel, lustre-modules,
lustre-ldiskfs, lustre itself and the e2fsprog lustre provides. I've
also  added the lnet module to modprobe.conf.
So, now I guess I should start setting up my two MDS+MDT servers, and
here is were I'm stuck: the lustre manual and Mount Conf say something
about making a filesystem, showing how to proceed with MDT and OST. But
I don't understand how I'm supposed to set up the MDS and OSS later :-/
Also, I made different partitions in the servers for the MDT and OST. I
*can* build the lustrefs using those partitions, can't I?
Node names are configured inside lustre, or are they just the domain
names i set up in the computers?
What do you call "sites"? (I quote from Mount Conf: "There should be one
MGS per site, not one MGS per filesystem")
If you could help me with all these little problems, it'd be great :)
Thanks a lot in advance!

With many doubts still, but hoping to get some solved soon,

	ra