Overview

The Open-Sharedroot project provides an open and flexible filesystem based single system image (SSI) layer for linux clusters.

It is a tried and field-tested next generation technology for heavy-duty high-availability clusters.

The Open-Sharedroot project is free for anyone to use, modify and distribute:

• It is licensed under the GPL v2 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
• It is mostly based on well documented Shell or Python code that coalesces with operating systems boot scripts and system commands.
• The latest source is made available on our download server http://download.atix.de/yum as Source RPMs

Getting Started

Joining the Open-Sharedroot project is easy.

• Subscribe to the open-sharedroot-users and/or open-sharedroot-devel mailinglists http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=156679
• Sign up for an Open-Sharedroot Account http://www.open-sharedroot.org/join_form
• Send an introduction with some notes about your experience and skill level to the mailinglist list (Don't forget this!)
• Become familiar with the Open-Sharedroot documentation (especially the howtos)
• Download or request the Installation DVD and install a demo system (ask for help when things seem tough)
• Talk with the community members about your ideas and suggestions
• Once you are familiar with the team and know some people, ask how you may help the developers and how you may contribute your code.

How the team works

The team itself consists of volunteer and ATIX members. Our preferred method of communication is directly via email and via mailinglists. The project is aimed to provide rock-solid enterprise features. Therefor our efforts need to be channeled so that the resulting code remains its high quality. Unfortunately this also means that the requests for enhancements need to be prioritised and strategically planned by the core developers. We try to be as transparent as possible and new ideas and suggestions are openly discussed.

The development roadmap http://www.open-sharedroot.org/development/osr-development-roadmap/major-os-platforms shows the rough direction of evolution.

What we need most

• We need people familiar with HA-clustering
• Smart people that bring in their suggestions
• System administrators that evaluate the Open-Sharedroot project
• Testing volunteers for the tech-preview features of the Open-Sharedroot project (especially the new SLES 10 support http://www.open-sharedroot.org/documentation/sles10-ocfs2-shared-root-mini-howto)
• Testing volunteers for our cluster installation DVD http://open-sharedroot.org/comoonics-anaconda

Previous Community Achievements

The most notably achievement in the past months was the integration of iSCSI support as tech-preview.