[kirugan]

Original whitepaper is a great overview of how the system works, but devil in the details. I still have a lot of questions about implementation, for instance:

from where did master get information about chunkservers (chubby, configuration files) ? did chunkserver know about which master it belongs to? etc.

[lokar]

GFS predated chubby.

The master is configured with the endpoints for all the chunkaervers. A separate control/config system supported this including things like automatic replacement of dead nodes.

[kirugan]

how do you know?

[lokar]

I was there

[kirugan]

Awesome! Just checked the whitepaper there was a cluster with 300 machines, so all machines had to be described in configuration file that was used by master, right?

[lokar]

Mostly. Binaries of that era took everything on the command line. The config system would generate that from files and keep the running binaries up to date via ssh.