We are excited to announce the release of MooseFS 4.57.6! This update brings crucial bug fixes and enhancements to improve stability and functionality across the system. If you’re using MooseFS, this release is highly recommended to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
What’s New in MooseFS 4.57.6?
Storage Classes Enhancements
Storage classes in MooseFS are essential for efficient data management. This update corrects a definition error where the * (wildcard) was missing from default storage classes in Erasure Coding (EC). While this could have led to unintended behaviour, no practical failures were observed. Additionally, we’ve refined the description of default storage classes for better clarity and usability.
System Stability and Recovery Improvements
Improved csipmap Initialization
The mfsipmap.cfg file now loads correctly on both reload and (re)start, ensuring seamless startup configurations.
Enhanced Chunk Recovery Conditions
We’ve addressed a situation affecting Erasure Coded (EC) chunks, where they were not readable if one Chunkserver (CS) was offline. This improvement enhances data reliability and read operations.
Lock Handling Fixes
MooseFS 4.57.6 resolves a problem where packets containing both posix_locks and flocks were invalid. This fix enhances file-locking mechanisms and ensures compatibility with different locking methods.
New Documentation Updates
We’ve added a manpage for the mfsmount.cfg configuration file, making it easier for users to understand and configure mounting options in MooseFS.
Upgrade Now!
This release includes important fixes and improvements that enhance stability and functionality. We strongly encourage upgrading to take advantage of these enhancements and ensure a more reliable experience.
We value your feedback! Let us know your thoughts on this update and feel free to report any concerns or suggestions. You can also check out our GitHub repository for more details, contributions, and issue tracking at GitHub MooseFS.
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!
We are thrilled to announce the release of the highly anticipated MooseFS 4.x Community Edition!
As an open-source solution, this new version brings an impressive array of exciting new features and enhancements that our community has been eagerly asking about. MooseFS 4.x introduces significant improvements over the previous 3.x version, offering powerful new capabilities and more efficient data storage solutions that address the needs of modern data environments.
We have a long-standing and strong commitment to the open-source community. Since 2005 we have been passionately involved in supporting and contributing to open-source initiatives. Our philosophy is to provide this superb tool to everyone who wants to use it, as we firmly believe in the power of open-source software and the strength of the community. By making MooseFS 4.x available to all, we continue to uphold our dedication to openness, collaboration, and the shared pursuit of technological innovation.
Erasure Coding and Space Optimisation
One of the most notable new features in MooseFS 4.x is the introduction of Erasure Coding (EC) in an 8+1 as well as 4+1 format. This innovative coding approach allows for significant space savings without compromising data integrity or protection. In traditional replication methods, data chunks are typically stored in multiple copies, which can occupy a substantial amount of space; for example, storing a chunk in 2 copies would normally use 200% of the required storage capacity. With the new EC8+1 coding format, you can achieve a comparable level of data protection while using only about 112.5% of the space needed for the actual data, and with EC4+1, 125%. This approach allows for more efficient data storage with significantly reduced overhead compared to non-Erasure Coding solutions, making MooseFS 4.x an excellent choice for data-intensive open-source applications.
New features and enhancements in MooseFS 4.x
The new chunk format includes better handling of control sums, which enhances data integrity and system reliability. We have also revamped the web-based interface, providing more detailed information, numerous new charts for monitoring, and an overall improved charting system that offers better insights into system performance. MooseFS 4.x introduces new multilan configuration options that allow clients in different LANs to communicate with the master within their IP class, enhancing network efficiency and performance.
The IP remapping feature in MooseFS 4.x has been significantly enhanced with the introduction of a more flexible remap file. This new configuration allows for full custom IP-to-IP remapping, enabling users to define completely custom mappings between IP addresses rather than being limited to the fixed remapping of leading bits as in previous versions. This improvement provides greater control over network configurations, making it easier to adapt MooseFS to complex network environments and specific infrastructure needs.
MooseFS 4.x also includes new configuration options that allow users to define flags and set limits for disks storing chunks, particularly when these disks are shared with other processes. This improvement enables more accurate calculation of occupied and available space, optimizing storage efficiency. Additionally, a new tool has been introduced for offline searching of metadata files based on conditions like chunk IDs, inodes, and attributes, greatly enhancing the ability to manage and locate specific data within the system.
The logging system in MooseFS 4.x has been significantly improved to enhance clarity and control. Log messages are now categorized by severity levels, allowing users to configure what should be logged and how these logs are reported to syslog. Additionally, there are numerous other new features and improvements in this version, such as enhanced tools for ACL handling, a new chunk format with better control sum management, and a variety of updates to existing algorithms that make MooseFS faster, more efficient, and less prone to errors in edge cases. With improvements in metadata handling, a new web-based interface for better monitoring, and expanded configuration options, MooseFS 4.x is designed to deliver a more powerful and flexible storage solution for our community. These enhancements are just the tip of the iceberg, with many other quality-of-life improvements aimed at making your data management experience smoother and more efficient.
More details
For more detailed information, be sure to check the release notes for the latest version, which include updates, new features, and bug fixes. You can explore the complete project code, contribute to development, or report issues directly on the project’s GitHub repository.
Looking Ahead
MooseFS 4.x represents a significant leap forward in our ongoing commitment to delivering robust, efficient, and user-friendly distributed file system solutions to our community. This new version not only introduces cutting-edge features and enhancements but also maintains the exceptional stability, ease of use, and manageability that users have come to rely on from previous versions. MooseFS continues to offer a dependable and intuitive solution for managing data storage, combining advanced capabilities with a user-friendly experience.
We are excited to see how these new features and improvements will empower our users to better manage their data storage needs. As always, we welcome feedback and encourage our community to explore these new capabilities to their fullest potential. Your input helps us to continually refine MooseFS and ensure it meets the evolving demands of our users.
MooseFS PRO
If you are looking for high availability (HA) for master servers, improved disk space management with enhanced data protection through EC configurations with higher redundancy levels, and dedicated support, we also offer the MooseFS PRO version. This version is designed for enterprise environments where uptime and data integrity are critical, providing features like automatic failover for master servers, more advanced erasure coding for greater resilience against hardware failures, and professional support services to ensure smooth operation and rapid issue resolution. MooseFS PRO adds an extra layer of reliability and optimisation for those managing large-scale, mission-critical storage systems.
Stay tuned!
Stay tuned for upcoming updates! Where we’ll continue to enhance the project with new features, improvements, and fixes. Be sure to follow the repository to receive notifications on the latest changes.
We are proud to announce, that MooseFS 3.0.100 has been released as stable today! This version includes support of Debian 9 (Stretch) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, as well as many other crucial fixes.
We are proud to announce, that MooseFS 3.0.97 has been released as stable today! This version fixes trash/sustained size desynchronization after file length is changed due to chunk creation and also handles invalid arguments in the POSIX lock command.
Please find the most recent changes on MooseFS 3 on GitHub.
If you like MooseFS, please provide your support by starring it on GitHub. You can also give your valuable suggestions by opening an issue on GitHub.
