ZFS Is gluster something I ought to want to deploy in my home FreeBSD environment?

[decuser]

I’m struggling to figure out whether gluster is useful enough to warrant me figuring it out. I currently use synchthing to sync stuff and I like the general idea of distributed files, but have gone down the cluster route before and it was painful, slow as molasses, and memory intensive. I’m hoping someone uses it and thinks it’s useful and can explain their view. I’m also thinking gluster on zfs might be interesting... and safe.

 

[jbo@]

I think it would be valuable if you share some information regarding "home FreeBSD environment" and what your needs & infrastructure are.

I had my fair share of dealing with storage clusters for both professional and private use cases. After years of dicking around I ended up simply using nextcloud for private uses. The nextcloud server (PHP) runs extremely well under FreeBSD. As for clients, there is deskutils/nextcloudclient which also provide a CLI that can be used to periodically issue a sync (eg. via cron). Alternatively, you can use net/rclone to talk to your nextcloud instance via WebDAV.

This solution served me well over the past few years and came with a lot less hassle than most of the other solutions I tried. Not to mention the benefits of having a WebUI, and clients for many other platforms such asr Android and iOS (if that is your sort of thing).
That being said, the server is of course running in a jail on decent hardware with a sensible ZFS pool that gets off-site backups via zfs send | zfs receive.

 

[decuser]

Home environment - a few desktops running fbsd 13 on zfs, and a laptop running same, plus various macs - pro, MacBook etc. I tried nextcloud a couple of years ago. I don’t remember why I didn’t keep it. I might give it another shot. But, I’m still curious about gluster.