This blog post aims to point to the various resources that document LINBIT open source software.
Because some people might find this post after having an in-the-moment need and then searching for a specific type of documentation resource, LINBIT documentation resources are listed here and linked to the sections in this post that describe them:
- Manual Pages
- User Guides
- Technical Guides
- Knowledge Base Articles
- CLI Help Text
- GitHub Projects
- LINSTOR API References
- Blog Posts
- LINBIT YouTube Channel
- LINBIT Community Forums
- LINBIT Mailing Lists
Manual Pages
DRBD® and other LINBIT open source software, such as DRBD Reactor, have manual pages. After installing the software on a system, you can read a particular manual page by entering man <manual-page-name> from a shell prompt. For example, to read the manual page for configuring DRBD version 9, enter:
man drbd.conf-9.0
To read the manual page for configuring the DRBD Reactor promoter plugin, enter:
man drbd-reactor.promoter
đź’ˇ TIP: If you do not know what particular manual page might be relevant to your in-the-moment need, you can try using tab completion if your shell supports it. For example:
man drbdTab. Or you can search for a term, such as “DRBD”, within all manual pages installed on the system, by enteringman -wK DRBD.
User Guides
The LINBIT team currently produces and maintains user guides in English for the following software:
- The DRBD9 User Guide: HTML | PDF
- The LINSTOR User Guide: HTML | PDF
- Understanding LINSTOR Gateway: HTML
- LINBIT VSAN User Guide: HTML
You can also find links to Chinese and Japanese translations of some LINBIT user guides on the LINBIT website.
The LINBIT user guides listed here are all open source. You are welcome to open issues, discuss the content, or contribute to improving them at the LINBIT documentation GitHub repository.
Technical Guides
The LINBIT team also produces and maintains how-to technical guides. These technical guides focus on using LINBIT software and provide step-by-step instructions for accomplishing a specific task.
Some examples of LINBIT’s how-to technical guides are:
- NFS High Availability Clustering Using DRBD and DRBD Reactor on RHEL 9
- Kubernetes Persistent Storage Using LINBIT SDS Quick Start
- KVM High Availability Clustering Using DRBD and Pacemaker on RHEL 9
The guides are written with enterprise and production deployment users in mind. The guides typically use software installed from official LINBIT customer software package repositories. You can get trial access to these repositories by contacting the LINBIT team. Community users of LINBIT software can also make use of these guides. The official packages just make installing and maintaining the software much easier.
Knowledge Base Articles
LINBIT maintains a collection of knowledge base articles at kb.linbit.com. Knowledge base articles will typically deal with a very specific feature or topic within a particular piece of LINBIT software. The articles are often symptom, problem, and solution based. Knowledge base articles are primarily intended to be helpful to regular and familiar users of LINBIT software.
CLI Help Text
Command help text is available for all major LINBIT software. The help text will give you usage syntax and help for various LINBIT CLI software commands.
You can show command help text by appending --help to a CLI command. For example, to get help with the DRBD Reactor client’s evict command, you can enter:
# drbd-reactorctl evict --help
GitHub Projects
LINBIT hosts its open source software codebases in repositories within the LINBIT GitHub organization page. These repositories might have README files that document aspects of the software, such as information about how to build the software from source code. Some repositories, such as the one for the LINBIT-developed, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project, Piraeus Datastore, will have their own documentation. On the Piraeus Datastore GitHub page, for example, you can find links to documentation such as tutorials, how-to guides, an API reference, and explanation-based help.
LINSTOR API References
LINSTOR® is the LINBIT-developed open source software-defined storage (SDS) solution for high availability, disaster recovery, and cloud, virtualization, or IaaS persistent storage provisioning. For developers or integrators, LINSTOR API references are here:
Blog Posts
Members of the LINBIT team contribute posts to the blog on the LINBIT website. Blog posts are often explanation-based and might explore a particular aspect or feature of LINBIT software, such as the impact of network latency on write performance when using DRBD. Some posts are how-to oriented and might show steps for configuring a feature or accomplishing an interesting task, such as running LINSTOR outside of Kubernetes but integrating the two by using the Kubernetes CSI plugin for LINSTOR. The blog post about creating a highly available NFS share for use with Proxmox VE is another example of a popular how-to post. Other posts might be informational and more general, such as the one comparing different open source virtualization platforms. Still others might be announcements about a new software feature or technical guide release, or they might simply be ruminations on a topic that relates to LINBIT software, such as disaster recovery. There is a lot of interesting and varied content within the LINBIT blog that you can explore.
LINBIT YouTube Channel
The LINBIT channel on YouTube has many videos that relate to LINBIT software. Some videos are detailed walk-through, how-to videos, such as the one about setting up LINSTOR for use in CloudStack. Others are announcement style or features-based, such as the video overview of “10 Things You Can Do With LINSTOR & Proxmox”. By the way, thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.
LINBIT Community Forums
LINBIT launched the LINBIT community forums in March of 2024. The forums are spaces where you can connect with the LINBIT open source community of users, developers, administrators, integrators, and others involved with LINBIT storage software solutions. Within the forums, you can ask questions, learn about new releases or features, collaborate on solutions, and make connections together with other LINBIT software users.
LINBIT Mailing Lists
LINBIT maintains three email lists related to its software:
The lists have regular activity still. Unless you are a developer collaborating on LINBIT software development, patching, or integration, you likely do not need to join the drbd-dev email list, although interesting technical details and topics do come up. The drbd-user and drbd-announce email lists will be most relevant to general LINBIT software users. Similar to the LINBIT community forums, you can ask questions related to using LINBIT software, not just DRBD, on the drbd-user list. You can also learn about new LINBIT software releases and features, including release candidate and preview releases, from the drbd-announce mailing list.
Conclusion
I will say, for a bit more background, that it is my ongoing goal to try to bring these resources together in a way that will make it so that someone’s journey through LINBIT documentation does not feel as fractured as it might appear to be, based on the need for such a blog post as this. The LINBIT team develops sophisticated software for solving what can sometimes be complex storage problems. Some of these solutions involve integrating with complex and deep platforms, such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. There is much to document and many places to do it in, as you might judge from this article. If you have suggestions for improvements you would like us to make, the team and I are open to suggestions, get in touch.
