[lustre-discuss] Announce: Lustre Systems Administration Guide

[Dilger, Andreas]

On Nov 17, 2017, at 20:20, Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thank you both for the documentation.  I know how hard it is to maintain. 
> 
> I've asked that all my admin staff to read it - even if some of it doesn't directly apply to our environment.
> 
> What we would like is well organised, comprehensive, accurate and up to date documenation.  Most of the time when I dive into the manual, or other online material, I find it isn't quite right (path's slightly wrong or outdated etc). 

The manual is open to contributions if you find problems therein.  Please see:

https://wiki.hpdd.intel.com/display/PUB/Making+changes+to+the+Lustre+Manual+source

> I also have difficulty finding all the information I want in a single location and in a logical fashon.  These aren't new issues and blight all documentation, but having the definitive source in a wiki might open it up to more transparency, greater use and thus, ultimately, being kept up to date, even if its by others outside Intel.

I'd be thrilled if there were contributors to the manual outside of Intel.  IMHO, users who are not intimately familiar with Lustre are the best people to know when the manual isn't clear or is missing information.  I personally don't read the manual very often, though I do reference it on occasion.  When I find something wrong or outdated, I submit a patch, and it generally is landed quickly.

> I'd also like a section where people can post their experiences and solutions.  For example, in recent times, we have battled bad interactions with ZFS+lustre which lead to poor performance and ZFS corruption.  While we have now tuned both lustre and zfs and the bugs have mostly been fixed, the learnings, trouble shooting methods etc. should be preserved and might assist others in the future diagnose tricky problems.

Stack overflow for Lustre?  I've been wondering about some kind of Q&A forum for Lustre for a while.  This would be a great project to propose to OpenSFS to be hosted on the lustre.org site (Intel does not manage that site).  I suspect there are numerous engines available for this already, and it just needs someone interested and/or knowledgeable enough to pick an engine and get it installed there.

Cheers, Andreas

> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 6:03 AM, Dilger, Andreas <andreas.dilger at intel.com> wrote:
> On Nov 16, 2017, at 22:41, Cowe, Malcolm J <malcolm.j.cowe at intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > I am pleased to announce the availability of a new systems administration guide for the Lustre file system, which has been published to wiki.lustre.org. The content can be accessed directly from the front page of the wiki, or from the following URL:
> >
> > http://wiki.lustre.org/Category:Lustre_Systems_Administration
> >
> > The guide is intended to provide comprehensive instructions for the installation and configuration of production-ready Lustre storage clusters. Topics covered:
> >
> >       • Introduction to Lustre
> >       • Lustre File System Components
> >       • Lustre Software Installation
> >       • Lustre Networking (LNet)
> >       • LNet Router Configuration
> >       • Lustre Object Storage Devices (OSDs)
> >       • Creating Lustre File System Services
> >       • Mounting a Lustre File System on Client Nodes
> >       • Starting and Stopping Lustre Services
> >       • Lustre High Availability
> >
> > Refer to the front page of the guide for the complete table of contents.
> 
> Malcolm,
> thanks so much for your work on this.  It is definitely improving the
> state of the documentation available today.
> 
> I was wondering if people have an opinion on whether we should remove
> some/all of the administration content from the Lustre Operations Manual,
> and make that more of a reference manual that contains details of
> commands, architecture, features, etc. as a second-level reference from
> the wiki admin guide?
> 
> For that matter, should we export the XML Manual into the wiki and
> leave it there?  We'd have to make sure that the wiki is being indexed
> by Google for easier searching before we could do that.
> 
> Cheers, Andreas
> 
> > In addition, for people who are new to Lustre, there is a high-level introduction to Lustre concepts, available as a PDF download:
> >
> > http://wiki.lustre.org/images/6/64/LustreArchitecture-v4.pdf
> >
> >
> > Malcolm Cowe

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Principal Architect
Intel Corporation