Announcing MooseFS 4.57.5: Enhanced Storage, Monitoring, and More!
We are excited to introduce MooseFS 4.57.5, the latest update packed with new features, improvements, and critical fixes to make your MooseFS experience even more robust and efficient. This release enhances storage management, improves monitoring capabilities, and resolves key issues, ensuring a smoother and more reliable distributed storage system.
Key Highlights of MooseFS 4.57.5
Enhanced Storage Class Functionality
Managing storage just got smarter! This update introduces storage class priorities, allowing chunks to select the highest-priority storage class they belong to, improving storage allocation behavior.
Additionally, exports.cfg now supports storage class group assignments, replacing the older mingoal and maxgoal approach with a more flexible and scalable solution. This means you can define up to 16 different storage groups and control which groups are allowed for exports, offering greater granularity and efficiency in storage management. By default, newly created and imported storage classes are assigned to group 0, while predefined legacy classes (1–9) are mapped to groups 1–9, ensuring backward compatibility while allowing for more customizable configurations.
For new installations, predefined storage classes have been improved, ensuring more logical defaults for a streamlined setup experience. This simplifies configuration, making it easier for new users to get started without extensive manual adjustments.
Locate and Manage Trash & Sustained Items More Easily
A significant usability improvement: metasearch now displays file paths for trash and sustained items, making it easier to find and clean up unnecessary files. This is particularly useful for administrators managing large volumes of data, as it simplifies maintenance and data organization. By providing full file paths, users can locate and verify files before taking action, reducing accidental deletions and improving overall file management.
Improved Cluster Monitoring and Leader Communication
Monitoring and maintaining a distributed storage system requires real-time insights and seamless communication between nodes.
To enhance observability, cluster traffic charts have been added to the GUI. These charts display total bytes per second read and written by all mounts, allowing administrators to analyze performance trends and detect potential bottlenecks more efficiently. Additionally, there are separate views for data-only and data-with-overhead traffic, helping in identifying bandwidth consumption patterns more precisely.
To improve leader synchronization, leader IP broadcasting in simple mode ensures that all follower nodes receive updated information about the active leader, preventing outdated or incorrect leader assignments from causing synchronization issues. The KEEP_LEADERSHIP option has also been introduced, allowing a specified master node to reclaim leadership automatically after disconnections or restarts. This significantly reduces failover complications, providing more stability and predictability in cluster operations.
Master Server Enhancements
The master server plays a crucial role in managing storage and ensuring metadata consistency. This update brings multiple optimizations to improve its reliability and performance.
One of the key fixes addresses better space management for EC (erasure-coded) parts marked for removal, preventing premature deletion before relocation. This fix ensures that parts stored on disks marked for removal are properly migrated before being deleted, reducing risks of unintended data loss.
Additionally, we have resolved changelog rotation issues in the Community Edition, a long-standing problem that users reported. Changelogs now rotate correctly, ensuring metadata consistency and preventing unnecessary log file bloat.
Another notable fix is the quota adjustment fix, ensuring that changes to the grace period are applied correctly, avoiding inconsistencies when modifying quota settings.
Furthermore, improvements in tracking chunk copies and erasure-coded parts have been implemented, ensuring reported values reflect the actual state of storage. This results in better accuracy for storage utilization statistics, preventing discrepancies in data integrity assessments.
GUI and CLI Improvements
User experience is key to effective system administration, and this update includes several improvements to the GUI and CLI for a smoother experience.
The maintenance time display is back for chunk servers, helping administrators keep track of active maintenance operations. This addition makes it easier to plan and coordinate maintenance tasks without disrupting ongoing workloads.
A fix has been applied to the graph summary bar, which now correctly represents licensing limits. Previously, incorrect negative values caused confusion about licensing constraints, but this fix ensures clear and accurate quota representation.
We have also improved chart legends, making them more readable and helping users quickly interpret storage and performance data without additional guesswork. Additionally, sanity checks for CLI integer values have been introduced, reducing the likelihood of misconfigurations that could lead to unexpected behavior. These checks provide an extra layer of protection against accidental input errors, ensuring commands are executed as intended.
Fixes Across Multiple Components
This release also brings stability improvements across various platforms and components to enhance MooseFS’s versatility and reliability.
One of the most critical updates is improved Linux ACL compatibility, ensuring that ACL attributes are correctly displayed in ls -al outputs with the + symbol. This enhancement brings MooseFS in line with standard Linux ACL behavior, improving compatibility with access control tools and ensuring proper permissions visibility.
For Windows users, a fix has been implemented for mutex initialization in the Windows client, resolving crashes that particularly affected Windows 7 systems. This fix significantly improves stability for Windows-based deployments, reducing unexpected application failures.
Additionally, we have introduced better warnings for duplicate variables in configuration files, helping users quickly identify misconfigurations. These warnings make troubleshooting simpler and prevent potential conflicts between settings, ensuring a smoother configuration experience.
🛑 Python 2.7 Support Deprecated
As part of our modernization efforts, support for Python 2.7 has been removed. This change aligns with current best practices and ensures compatibility with modern development environments. Python 2.7 reached end-of-life in 2020, and continuing to support it posed security and maintenance risks. Users relying on Python 2.7 are encouraged to upgrade to Python 3 to ensure continued support, better performance, and future-proof compatibility with MooseFS.
Upgrade Today!
We strongly recommend upgrading to MooseFS 4.57.5 to take advantage of these new features, performance enhancements, and critical bug fixes.
Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for being part of the MooseFS community!
