SaunaFS 5.5.0 (and a few announcements)

[uristdwarf]

Hey there everyone.

For those who noticed, 5.5.0 was already tagged last week, but no announcement or package for it. That's because of two reasons, with the first being that there were some failures in our Ansible tests. Those turned out to be likely false-positives, but it's unlikely a regression considering it was related to uraft, and there were no uraft changes in this release. Regardless, the risk something broke is very low, but we will continue investigating the issue.

The second reason I will get into later, but let's summarize some of the changes:

Changes since last release

• Master inotifier: You can listen into master and be notified of filesystem operations. It's currently experimental, and we may change the interfaces/network protocols for it (it may not work in the future without updating). There's a specific tool being developed for a collaboration between SaunaFS and Opencloud, but it's not yet available. Howev er, you can use the metadata notifier tool to access it for now, or use it as a reference for your own implementations.
• Ganesha 9.3: The FSAL plugin has been updated for Ganesha 9.3. This also means it's very unlikely to work with older versions. If you can't upgrade to Ganesha 9.3, you can keep the FSAL on 5.4.0, and upgrade everything else (it should work fine).
• Misc. Fixes: There's some fixes regarding the tools not exiting on invalid options and case sensitiveness. Also some tests were fixed.
• Master memory usage: It should be decreased by around ~10% from previous releases.

Now, for the announcements: There's two Christmas gifts I would like to present:

SaunaFS Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 apt repositories are now public!

This means you do not need to contact us or fill out a form. Just follow the installation documentation on docs.saunafs.com, ignoring the authentication part, and you can start using it immediately, no login required. Additionally, there's also repositories for the release candidates (saunafs-ubuntu-[22|24]04-staging) and dev branch (saunafs-ubuntu-[22|24]04-dev), if you would like to experiment with the newest unstable versions of SaunaFS.

In addition...

New monitoring for SaunaFS

This one was already internally used for a while. It was developed with the REST API at the same time, though when we released REST API, we decided at the moment not to release the new monitoring UI. As you can see, the interface (outside a few color changes) is mostly the same with the old. Perhaps the biggest change in functionality is the graphs.

You can find the repository here: https://github.com/leil-io/saunafs-monitoring

Currently, the monitoring is only available as a docker image. You can either build the docker image yourself, or pull from registry.saunafs.com/library/saunafs-monitoring or registry.saunafs.com/library/saunafs-api. However, if there's enough interest, we can also make Ubuntu packages for it. There's some experimental packaging in the repository if you want to try to build them yourselves.

The old CGI was, to put it mildly, simply unmaintainable. So a rewrite of it was desperately needed. I decided to mostly preserve the same interface and functionality as the old. But a more thorough redesign might be in order later down the line.

What's next?

For next year, we have a few more things in mind:

1. We will provide docker images and compose files so you can quickly set up SaunaFS on any machine with docker.
2. We will also start providing RPM packages, first for Rocky Linux and then for other RPM distros. We might also provide official packages for Debian. Also hopefully next year, you should see packages arrive for Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian sid.

And a lot more, so stay tuned and have happy holidays.

• The Leil Storage team