Two Pi R

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 20:19:23 +0000

Although many people are excited about the hardware-hacking possibilities with the Raspberry Pi, one of the things that interests me most is the fact that it is essentially a small low-power Linux server I can use to replace other Linux servers I already have around the house. In previous columns, I've talked about using the Raspberry Pi to replace the server that controls my beer fridge and colocating a Raspberry Pi in Austria. After I colocated a Raspberry Pi in Austria, I started thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of using something with so many single points of failure as a server I relied on, so I started thinking about ways to handle that single point of failure. When you see "Two Pi R", you probably think the R stands for the radius for a circle. To me, it stands for redundancy. I came to the conclusion that although one Pi isn't redundant, two Pi are.

So, in this article, I'm building the foundation for setting up redundant services with a pair of Raspberry Pis. I start with setting up a basic clustered network filesystem using GlusterFS. In later articles, I'll follow up with how to take advantage of this shared storage to set up other redundant services. Of course, although I'm using a Raspberry Pi for this article, these same steps should work with other hardware as well.

Configure the Raspberry Pis

To begin, I got two SD cards and loaded them with the latest version of the default Raspberry Pi distribution from the official Raspberry Pi downloads page, the Debian-based Raspbian. I followed the documentation to set up the image and then booted in to both Raspberry Pis while they were connected to a TV to make sure that the OS booted and that SSH was set to start by default (it should be). You probably also will want to use the raspi-config tool to expand the root partition to fill the SD card, since you will want all that extra space for your redundant storage. After I confirmed I could access the Raspberry Pis remotely, I moved them away from the TV and over to a switch and rebooted them without a display connected.

By default, Raspbian will get its network information via DHCP; however, if you want to set up redundant services, you will want your Raspberry Pis to keep the same IP every time they boot. In my case, I updated my DHCP server so that it handed out the same IP to my Raspberry Pis every time they booted, but you also could edit the /etc/network/interfaces file on your Raspberry Pi and change:


iface eth0 inet dhcp

to:

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Special Report: Scale Out with GlusterFS

LJ Staff — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 17:57:08 +0000

by LJ Staff

Learn how to install, benchmark and optimize this popular, shared-nothing and scalable open-source distributed filesystem in this special 12 page report.

Please provide your email below for an instant download.

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