Export HDFS over CIFS (Samba3)

Three weeks ago I played with libhdfs and NFS, but I did not get the results I expected. Then my next idea was, why not to use Samba? Samba3x is stable and most OS can mount an exported share.
The main task was to research the performance and setup of this scenario, because samba has a lot of tuning mechanisms inside. Let's go!

I used a RHEL 5.7 and the delivered RPMs:
 #> rpm -qa|grep samba
 samba-3.0.33-3.29.el5_7.4.x86_64
 samba-common-3.0.33-3.29.el5_7.4.x86_64

Like I described in "NFS exported HDFS" I mounted hdfs over fuse into the directory /123 via /etc/fstab:

 #> cat /etc/fstab
 [..]
 hadoop-fuse-dfs#dfs://NAMENODE:9000 /123/hdfs fuse usetrash,rw 0 0

and checked it:
 #> mount
 [..]
 fuse on /123/hdfs type fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions)

 #> ls -la /123
 total 16
 drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   4096 Dec  9 16:36 .
 drwxr-xr-x 27 root root   4096 Dec  9 12:11 ..
 drwxr-xr-x  5 hdfs nobody 4096 Dec  9 02:14 hdfs

The first step afterwards is to configure samba. I figured that config out:

#> cat /etc/samba/smb.conf
[global]
        bind interfaces only = yes
        deadtime = 15
        default case = lower
        disable netbios = yes
        interfaces = eth0
        dns proxy = no
        workgroup = HDFS
        server string = Samba Server Version %v
        socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=65536 SO_SNDBUF=65536
        load printers = no
        max connections = 30
        strict sync = no
        sync always = no
        syslog = 1
        syslog only = yes
        security = user
        smb passwd file = /etc/samba/smbpasswd
        
[hdfs]
        comment = HDFS
        path = /123/hdfs
        public = yes
        writable = yes
        printable = no
        create mask = 0744
        force user = hdfs
        force group = nobody

Created user and password, here I used the hdfs-system-user (id=hdfs, group=nobody)      

smbpasswd -a username

At last I started the server:
 #> service smb restart

Test cases
For testing I used another RHEL5.7 server and mounted the exported share into /test:
 #> mount -t cifs -o username=hdfs,rw //SAMBASERVER/hdfs /test
 Password: HERE_THE_PASSWORD

check:
 #> ls -la /test/
 total 8
 drwxr-xr-x  5 hdfs nobody    0 Dec  9 02:14 .
 drwxr-xr-x 25 root root   4096 Dec  9 15:03 ..
 drwxr-xr-x  3 hdfs nobody    0 Dec  9 02:12 mapred
 drwxr-xr-x  3 hdfs nobody    0 Dec  9 02:13 opt
 drwxr-xr-x  6 hdfs nobody    0 Dec  9 15:56 user

Now the hdfs from my testcluster is exported via samba. So far, so good.

My first test concerned the read performance, here I chose a rsync of a smaller logfile collection:
 #> cd /tmp/rsync-test
 #> rsync -av /test/hdfs/user/flume/weblogs/2011-12-07/ .
 sent 20478888644 bytes  received 92606 bytes  17377158.46 bytes/sec
 total size is 20475835998
 (19GB, 16 MB/s) 

How many files I synced?
 #> find . -type f |wc -l
 4665

Okay, that worked. Then I tested the write speed, here I used a plain file I created with

 #> dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/13GB bs=128M count=100

and copied it into the cifs-mount, for testing with "time":
 #> time cp /tmp/13GB /test/hdfs/user/
 real 7m57.864s
 user 0m0.328s
 sys 0m20.602s

= around 27 mb/s

checked for correct rights and groups on hdfs:

 hdfs#> hadoop dfs -ls /user
 Found 1 item
 -rw-r--r--   3 hdfs supergroup 13421772800 2011-12-09 15:56 /user/13GB

To compare with a scp write test I used:
 #> scp /tmp/13GB hdfs@SAMBASERVER:/123/hdfs/user

and got
13GB  100%   13GB  47.8MB/s   04:28

which is much faster. The overhead from samba will cost performance, for sure.

Conclusion
It is possible to export a hdfs filesystem over libhdfs and samba to clients and get acceptable results. That makes some tasks easier, including the use of hdfs as a (limited) cluster storage.

Links:
Samba-Tuning: https://calomel.org/samba_optimize.html