Are you looking for how to bring back a Gluster brick online? Here’s how we do it.

Usually, we check for the reason why it went offline.

Mostly old Gluster configuration causes this error. So we kill those processes and start the volume again.

At Bobcares, we often fix errors on GlusterFS, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Engineers bring the Gluster brick online.

Gluster brick going offline

Firstly, we will see what is Gluster and its components namely, volume and brick.

Gluster is an open-source distributed file system. It allows the rapid provisioning of additional storage as per user requirement. The primary feature of Gluster is automatic failover.

The basic unit of storage in GlusterFS is named Brick. Each brick is an export directory on a server in a storage pool. And a logical collection of Brick is volume. We perform Gluster management operations on the volume.

Sometimes even after starting a volume, everything does work as configured. There can be changes in the mounted volumes.

In such cases, when we check the log we could see the error in the storage. And the reason for this is some bricks going offline. So let’s see how to bring it back online.

How to bring brick online?

Whenever our customers approach us with this condition, we check the running process.

For this our Support Engineers look at the process list. Most of the times, some processes will be present using old configuration.

So we kill such processes. Then we forcefully start the volume using the command,

gluster volume start <volume_name> force

Later we recheck the status on Gluster volume. And it appears as,

Thus we ensure that bricks are online back.

[Need assistance in fixing GlusterFS errors? – We can help you.]

Conclusion

In short, to bring Gluster brick online eliminate the reason that made it offline. Then force start the Gluster volume to bring every brick back online. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error.