Note
Shortcut for Debian / Ubuntu users:
If you run Debian or some recent version of Ubuntu on the AMD64 architecture, you can use the make-discoproject-debian script in the source tree to build your own deb-packages. This will ensure that the packages are compatible with the software (particularly Python) versions in your cluster.
Alternatively, you may try out our experimental deb-packages which are available at the Disco download page.
If the packages installed properly, you should Configure Authentication.
Assuming you have already gotten Disco running out of the source directory, as described in Install Disco, to install system-wide, just run make install as root:
make install
This will build and install the Disco master to your system (see the Makefile for exact directory locations). You can specify DESTDIR and prefix, in compliance with GNU make.
On systems that are intended to function as Disco worker nodes only, you can use the make install-node target instead.
make install installs a configuration file to /etc/disco/settings.py that is tuned for clusters, not a single machine.
By default, the settings assume that you have at least three nodes in your cluster, so DDFS can use three-way replication. If you have fewer nodes, you need to lower the number of replicas in /etc/disco/settings.py:
DDFS_TAG_MIN_REPLICAS=1
DDFS_TAG_REPLICAS=1
DDFS_BLOB_REPLICAS=1
Most likely you do not need to modify anything else in this file right now, but you can change the settings here, if the defaults are not suitable for your system.
See disco.settings for more information.
You can use any account for running Disco, however it may be convenient to create a separate disco user. Among other advantages, this allows setting resource utilization limits for the disco user (through limits.conf or similar mechanism).
Since Disco places no special requirements on the user, (except access to certain ports and the ability to execute and read its files), simply follow the guidelines of your system when it comes to creating new users.
You can easily integrate disco into your system’s startup sequence. As an example, you can see how disco-master.init is implemented in Disco’s debian packaging.
On the Disco nodes, DDFS creates by default a subdirectory named vol0 under the DDFS_DATA directory to use for storage. If you have one or more dedicated disks or storage areas you wish to use instead, you can mount them under the directory specified by DDFS_DATA as subdirectories named vol0, vol1 and so on.