[Moosefs-users] geographical fun with MooseFS

[Mike <isp...@gm...>]

What if someone wrote a patch for MooseFS that looked at the IP of the 
client, and the IP of the chunk servers that had the chunk the client 
wanted, and tried to pick the closest one?

something like

   client = 10.1.1.1
   chunkserver with copy#1 = 10.1.1.2
   chunkserver with copy#2 = 10.1.1.20
   chunkserver with copy#3 = 10.1.2.2

Those 3 chunk servers would be used in that order, since their IPs are 
closer to the client's IP (using a formula like a*256^3+b*256^2+c*256+d 
to calculate an integer? long int? based on an IP address).

This way you could have "close" chunk servers respond to most of the 
requests from a client, but if no "close" server had the chunk you 
wanted, you could go to a "distant" one.

Drop two IPs on the client's interface, and do some careful numbering, 
and you can even set preference on a machine on the same LAN.

This might make for a really simple way to do "distant" archives that 
don't get used for reads unless they are the only source that's 
available, and other similar problems.

writes would be a different problem.

Thoughts? comments?