Hi there,<div><br></div><div>I am working for a customer right now who is considering Red Hat Storage Server. One of the sought-after features there is bit-rot detection, and even better, (semi-automatic) bit-rot restoration.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I know RHSS (nor GlusterFS) has this kind of functionality at the moment (correct me if i'm wrong!), but I would like to propose a design for this as a sort of translator that can be stacked on i.e. a (geo) replication translator.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Bit-rot detection can be done through check-summing. It should be a very low priority job running on one of the bricks. The job walks the complete file system and, per file, calculates the check-sum, compares it with the stored check-sum (if present, otherwise it stores the check-sum on all involved bricks, because it hasn't been checked before).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Bit-rot restoration could be implemented by comparing the check-sums of the replicas. If there is a mismatch, a more thorough check must be performed, like running a check-sum on all replica's for that file again, do a bit-wise compare, or whatever. If the files are still the same, the check-sum(s) must be replaced. If not, there is actual bit-rot detected. Now what to do? Which replica holds the clean version (the thruth?). With an uneven number of replicas one could simply make it a democratic process and have it fully automated. It should however save the to be replaced version in a separate store and notify the admin for verification. Another method would be to just notify the admin and do nothing.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The obvious place to store the check-sums would be in the extended attributes, but one could use a database for it.</div><div><br></div><div>I have watch the presentation <a href="https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/videos/red-hat-summit-2012-deep-dive-red-hat-storage" style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-size:12px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,51,204);font-family:'Liberation Sans','Trebuchet MS','Bitstream Vera Sans',helvetica,verdana,arial,sans-serif;line-height:18px;text-align:left">Red Hat Summit 2012 - A Deep Dive Into Red Hat Storage</a> by Jeff Darcy and I know he (and Red Hat) are very keen on extending the number of translators with useful functionality. I am no programmer myself, but would like to get involved in this kind of stuff.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Comments are very welcome!</div>