Hi, There is some development going on in both yahoo and facebook about making the namenode HA, but so far there is nothing released that will do this. So to answer your question: no, the namenode is a single point of failure with no possibility of switching during runtime.
The only solution is to: -> write output namenode metadata to two locations: localdisk, and a ntfs mount. -> you must always run the seconday/checkpoint namenode. if not the Namenode will never merge its edits.log file into the on disk image file. (the primary namenode only merges edits.log into the image under two conditions : restart, or the secondary namenode requests a checkpoint) -> make backups with a cronned script requesting checkpoints via the namenode http api, and store these backups off rack even off site. Using another namenode when the current namenode fails is then a restore from one of the backups you've made or using one of the checkpoints made by the secondary namenode. But I can't stress enough the fact that you need to make as many backups as possible of your metadata, or else total data loss will occur if you can't recover the metadata. Hope this helps. cheers, Gerrit On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Ozcan ILIKHAN <ilik...@cs.wisc.edu> wrote: > Currently in my mini cluster I have one active and one backup NameNode. > Whenever I need backup NameNode to be active/regular NameNode, I shutdown it > and restart in active mode. As far as I understand from documentation and > code, there is no way to switch from backup to active role at run time. > > Does anyone have a better idea of handling this situation? > > Thanks, > Ozcan. >
