[Linux-cluster] Question regarding cluster software upgrade

[Shaun Ferguson]

Greetings,

I am new to the list, but have been working with GFS and its relative
cluster software for a little more than a year now (so, probably, I'm
new to GFS too!)

Over the summer we upgraded and expanded our cluster's hardware, and as
a result of needing a more recent Linux kernel found it also necessary
to switch from using an older Sistina version of GFS to a CVS version of
the Red Hat GFS project.  This has been working fairly well, but alas a
recurring bug has cropped up that looks like it is related to DLM.  It
causes a kernel panic in certain as-yet-unidentified conditions, and
grinds our cluster's GFS activity to a halt until the afflicted node
gets fenced.

Notwithstanding, since a newer version (circa Oct 5th) was released as a
"stable" tarball, cluster-1.01.00.tar.gz, we are planning on upgrading
to this in the near future to see if it helps resolve our stability
issues with DLM and in general provide us with a better foundation to
work through any other issues.

We've already identified the necessity for all cluster nodes to have the
same version of Fence in order to join the fence domain under the new
software, through a preliminary test on one of our non-GFS cluster
nodes.  It brought to mind what other incompatibilities might exist
between the 1.01.00 release and the CVS version we built our GFS
file-system with.  Most importantly:  will we need to do any data
migration in order to use the new version of the GFS toolkit and driver,
or will we be able to mount and maintain our currently-formatted GFS
partitions with the new software as-is?

Here are the two version numbers as reported by `gfs_tool -V`:

gfs_tool DEVEL.1115852579 (built May 11 2005 18:09:10)
gfs_tool 1.01.00 (built Nov 14 2005 11:13:41)

Please let me know if any additional information is needed.

Thank you sincerely for your time,

Shaun Ferguson
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