CSE recycle option

Feature Requests Rejected Requests
1

I’d like the ability to recycle Aerospike and tell it to start empty without having to edit my config file and add CSE=true, start, and then change all to false.

ex…

service aerospike startempty

it’d be immensely time saving… thanks :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

@vshield thoughts? also bump

3

Thanks for the suggestion Albot, its a good option to have!

will discuss internally and look into creating one

–Cheers

4

Just for your update @Albot

we have raised a feature request internally to look into the possibility

–Cheers

1 Like
5

We’ve actually discussed this and the recommendation would actually to not use cold-start-empty altogether.

Here are the key points:

1- For preventing deleted records to reappear upon cold start, one should either make use of the durable delete feature, or fully zeroize a device using the dd or blkdiscard commands.

2- The cold-start-empty directive is very dangerous as it leaves previous versions of the records on the disk and a subsequent non empty cold start would then be damaging (single or multi nodes).

3- cold-start-empty was meant as a convenience exclusively when used permanently for a given namespace, with the risks associated with a multinode cold restart that would go with it.

4- An alternate work around, which is actually as dangerous as a cold-start-empty, but wouldn’t lead down the path of thinking about it as a ‘full feature’ would be to dd the first 1 MB of a device (clear up the header). This would be seen as an operational workaround for such cases where the cold-start-empty directive is not consistently used. But again, it has the same issues and is not recommended.

The blkdiscard command should be the fastest and most secure way, when supported, to start a namespace empty when durable or expiry based deletes are not used.

1 Like
6

Thanks Meher. The Micron drives we have actually take quite a while to blank out, as blkdiscard doesn’t work on them. Was looking at CSE as an option, but we’ll go with the safer one as you recommend.

7

Micron ships a program, msecli, to manage the disks. I believe it can zeroize the disks quickly (like blkdiscard).

8

I’ll test that out and validate with od. I had forgotten about that option… Thanks Kevin

9

It’s actually just as slow as using the dd option fwiw

10

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