Garage
A garage server is used for backups.
Summary
The idea of garage is to distribute data within nodes of a cluster and expose an S3 API to populate it.
Our node, marsouin
(a secondary computer made up of old hard drives) is connected to the Rhizome's cluster, comprised of 6 nodes totalling a few TB at the time of writting.
Routing
Garage requires a public IP adress on port 3901 by default, but marsouin
does not own one.
Instead, the port is forwarded from sagouin
which has one, to marsouin
thanks to the following iptable rules on sagouin
:
iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -d <PUBLIC_IP> --dport <PORT> -j DNAT --to-destination <PRIVATE_IP_MARSOUIN>:<PORT>
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -p tcp --dport <PORT> -j SNAT --to-source=<PRIVATE_IP_SAGOUIN>
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
Basically what they do is preroute incomming packets towards marsouin
and masquerade its response as if it came from sagouin
.
The iptables rules are made persistent by putting them in a Yunohost specific bash script that is executed at startup, named
/etc/yunohost/hooks.d/post_iptable_rules/99-specific_rules
Marsouin storage
marsouin
is another computer located in the same private network as sagouin
whose sole utility is to store old, semi-broken hard drives.
As such it will be slow and prone to hardware failures.
To limit the impact of these issues, a software RAID have been set up with btrfs
:
sudo mkfs.btrfs -d raid1c3 -m raid1c3 /dev/sd{a,b,d,e,f}
sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt
meaning that a RAID1 with 3 duplications is distributed across 5 hard drives of varying capacities, both for data and metadata storage. As such, 1 to 2 hard drives can fail without much of an impact outside.
The state of the RAID can be checked with
btrfs filesystem usage /mnt
Garage setup
After installing garage and starting it with a
garage server
with the following configuration
metadata_dir = "/mnt/meta"
data_dir = "/mnt/data"
db_engine = "lmdb"
replication_mode = "3"
rpc_bind_addr = "0.0.0.0:3901"
rpc_public_addr = "<PUBLIC_IP>:3901"
rpc_secret = "<SECRECT>"
[s3_api]
s3_region = "garage"
api_bind_addr = "<PRIVATE_IP>:3900"
Our node have been connected to the rest of the cluster with
garage node connect NODE_ID_OF_SOME_OTHER_NODE
which made the cluster available to us. This can be verified with
garage status
Our node then needs to be described to others with
garage layout assign OUR_NODE_ID -z ZONE -t TAG -c CAPACITY
garage layout show # To check that everything is right
garage layout apply --version XXX
with ZONE
being vaguely a geographical zone to favor distributing accross zones, TAG
a simple tag for the user and CAPACITY
being a vague description of how much space is available.
Our current rule of thumb for the capacity is the number of GB in the node, but it could be any integer.
The --version
flag in the apply
command is simply incremented every time the cluster layout is modified.
S3 Bucket
In order to expose the storage as S3, the following have been done on marsouin:
- Create a new bucket
garage bucket create BUCKETNAME
garage bucket set-quotas BUCKETNAME --max-size 200GiB
- Create a new key to access the bucket
garage key new --name KEYNAME
garage bucket allow --read --write --owner BUCKETNAME --key KEYNAME