Pete. I consulted one of our developers and showed him the error we were getting when trying to write objects to HPSS. He told me that the xattr data contained in the object it was trying to write did contain some binary data.: <table> <tr valign=top> <td>[80][02]}q[01](U[0e]Content-Lengthq[02]U[04]1024q[03]U[04]nameq[04]U8/AUTH_91186334603648d78602bf5481e9393f/c3/tmp/data4.fileq[05]U[13]X-Object-Meta-Mtimeq[06]U\r1352219008.97q[07]U[04]ETagq[08]U 1868a60a20c5ed4a02ecb257f7019bebq\tU[0b]X-Timestampq\nU[10]1352219888.77388q[0b]U[0c]Content-Typeq[0c]U[18]application/octet The two digit hex values in the square brackets are the non-printable characters that were part of the xattr value.</table> David Hernandez Contractor / HPSS IBM Global Business Services - US Federal 12301 Kurland Dr Suite 300 Houston, TX 77034-4812 Mobile 713-444-5755 From: Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev@redhat.com> To: David Hernandez/Houston/Contr/IBM@IBMUS Cc: Derek Higgins <derekh@redhat.com>, rhos-list@redhat.com, zaitcev@redhat.com Date: 11/05/2012 08:35 PM Subject: Re: Unable to access Swift using Keystone on reboot <hr noshade> <tt>On Mon, 5 Nov 2012 17:22:48 -0600 David Hernandez <dhern@us.ibm.com> wrote: > Does Swift try to write binary extended attributes? It may if user asks it to, but I think not for itself normally. > Does Swift use setfattr to write extended atrributes? Swift uses the syscall fsetxattr(2), while setfattr(1) is a shell command. With the defails aside, I thought about the problem of HPSS a little bit in general. I continue to think that your attempts of running Swift on top of HPSS VFS are ill-advised. If I may, you really need a different thing: a module for so-called "Swift LFS" (Local File System) which supports HPSS natively. Unfortunately, LFS does not yet exist. The Red Hat Storage team is working on an implementation of it, called "Gluster UFO" (Unified Storage Objects). If someone wrote a plugin that worked as "HPSS UFO", the issues of extended attributes, or any other kind of impedance matching, would be contained within such plugin. It could even bypass HPSS VFS altogether. I think it would be ideal for your needs -- as much as I understand them, of course. So, if you want to deploy Swift today, please use tried and tested storage back-ends. But by all means, feel free to help OpenStack community to develop LFS/UFO for tomorrow. Yours, -- Pete </tt>