Installing GlusterFS 3.4.x, 3.5.x or 3.6.0 on RHEL or CentOS 6.6
With the release of RHEL-6.6 and CentOS-6.6, there are now glusterfs packages in the standard channels/repositories. Unfortunately, these are only the client-side packages (like glusterfs-fuse and glusterfs-api). Users that want to run a Gluster Server on a current RHEL or CentOS now have difficulties installing any of todays current version of the Gluster Community packages.
The most prominent issue is that the glusterfs package from RHEL has a version of 3.6.0.28, and that is higher than the last week released version of 3.6.0. RHEL is shipping a pre-release that was created while the Gluster Community was still developing 3.6. An unfortunate packaging decision added a .28 to the version, where most other pre-releases would fall-back to a (rpm-)version like 3.6.0-0.1.something.bla.el6. The difference might look minor, but the result is a major disruption in the much anticipated 3.6 community release.
For the immediate need to fix this in a most easy way for our community users, we have decided to release version 3.6.1 later this week (maybe on Thursday November 6). This version is higher than the version in RHEL/CentOS, and therefore yum will prefer the package from the community repository over the one available in RHEL/CentOS. This is also the main reason why there have been no 3.6.0 packages provided on the download server.
Installing an older stable release (like 3.4 or 3.5) on RHEL/CentOS 6.6 requires a different approach. At the moment we can offer two solutions that can be used. We are still working on making this easier, until that is finalized, some manual actions are required.
Lets assume you want to verify if todays announced glusterfs-3.5.3beta2 packages indeed fix that bug you reported. (These steps apply to the other versions as well, this just happens to be what I have been testing.)
Option A: use exclude in the yum repository files for RHEL/CentOS
- download the glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo file and save it under /etc/yum.repos.d/
- edit /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo or /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and under each repository that you find, add the following line
exclude=glusterfs*
This prevents yum from installing the glusterfs* packages from the standard RHEL/CentOS repositories, but allows those packages from others. The Red Hat Customer Portal has an article about this configuration too.
Option B: install and configure yum-plugin-priorities
Using yum-plugin-priorities is probably a more stable solution. This does not require changes to the standard RHEL/CentOS repositories. However, an additional package needs to get installed.
- enable the optional repository when on RHEL, CentOS users can skip this step
# subscription-manager repos --list | grep optional-rpms # subscription-manager repos --enable=*optional-rpms - install the yum-plugin-priorities package:
# yum install yum-plugin-priorities
- download the glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo file and save it under /etc/yum.repos.d/
- edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo file and add the following option to each repository definition:
priority=50
The default priority for repositories is 99. The repositories with the lowest number have the highest priority. As long as the RHEL/CentOS repositories do not have the priority option set, the packages from the glusterfs-353beta2-epel.repo will get preferred by yum.
When using the yum-plugin-priorities approach, we highly recommend that you check if all your repositories have a suitable (or missing) priority option. In case some repositories have the option set, but yum-plugin-priorities was not installed yet, the order of the repositories might have changed. Because of this, we do not want to force using yum-plugin-priorities on all the Gluster Community users that run on RHEL/CentOS.
In case users still have issues installing the Gluster Community packages on RHEL or CentOS, we recommend getting in touch with us on the Gluster Users mailinglist (archive) or in the #gluster IRC channel on Freenode.