Setting up Venti

If you want to mirror your partitions using several disks, read the last section of setting up fossil to see an example of how to use fs(3) to do that.

Venti storage is divided into a log holding the data and an index mapping SHA1 hash to position in the log. The log is split into fixed-size (say, 500MB) chunks called arenas. There may be more than one file holding arenas for the Venti server. Their concatenation forms the actual log. The index is made up of individual index section files. You want about 5% as much index space as you have arena space. So if you have 100GB of arenas, plan on 5GB of index.

Use disk/fdisk to create a Plan 9 partition on the disks you wish to use for Venti. Then use disk/prep to subdivide the Plan 9 partition into the arena files or index sections that Venti will use. The rest of this document assumes that you named the arena files /dev/sdC0/arenas{0,1} and that you named the index sections /dev/sdC0/isect{0,1}.

Format the arenas with:

venti/fmtarenas arenas0 /dev/sdC0/arenas0
venti/fmtarenas arenas1 /dev/sdC0/arenas1

Format the index sections with:

venti/fmtisect isect0 /dev/sdC0/isect0
venti/fmtisect isect1 /dev/sdC0/isect1

Note that formatting the arenas and the index sections zeros the disk partitions, so it takes a long time.

Create a venti.conf file containing:

# the name of the index
index main

# the index sections
isect /dev/sdC0/isect0
isect /dev/sdC0/isect1

# the arenas
arenas /dev/sdC0/arenas0
arenas /dev/sdC0/arenas1

Format the index itself with:

venti/fmtindex venti.conf

Note that once you format the index you should not change the order of the index sections nor should you change the order of the arenas. It is safe to add new arenas.

If you plan on booting the machine with venti/fossil as your root you should write the venti config into the arenas0 file:

venti/conf -w /dev/sdC0/arenas0 < venti.conf

Now the disks are ready. You can start the Venti server with

venti/venti -w

The file venti.conf must be in the current directory.

Set the environment variable: venti=your-ip-address

if required, you can put this in the startup scripts like /rc/bin/termrc. You can also add this line in plan9.ini

Test the server with:

vac -f /tmp/x.vac /adm
vacfs /tmp/x.vac
ls -l /n/vac

Congratulations! You have a Venti.

If you plan on booting with venti/fossil as your root you should add venti=/dev/sdC0/arenas0 in your plan9.ini. During boot the configuration file previously written to the start of this partition with the venti/conf program will be read back and used.

See venti.conf(6), venti(8), and ventiaux(8) for more information.

ip/ipconfig loopback /dev/null 127.1

venti/venti -a tcp!127.1!venti -h tcp!127.1!http -w

For some purposes it is desirable to exclude files or directories from being archived to venti. For example, if you want your $home/tmp excluded, set the 't' flag (temporary) for it (see chmod(1) for details):

chmod +t $home/tmp

After that, no files in tmp will be archived to venti. You can set the 't' flag for files, too

You can find the scripts (and his explanation) on http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2003-March/023470.html