Software Heritage - Datastore Scrubber#

Tools to periodically checks data integrity in swh-storage and swh-objstorage, reports errors, and (try to) fix them.

This is a work in progress; some of the components described below do not exist yet (cassandra storage checker, objstorage checker, recovery, and reinjection)

The Scrubber package is made of the following parts:

Checking#

Highly parallel processes continuously read objects from a data store, compute checksums, and write any failure in a database, along with the data of the corrupt object.

There is one “checker” for each datastore package: storage (postgresql and cassandra), journal (kafka), and objstorage.

The journal is “crawled” using its native streaming; others are crawled by range, reusing swh-storage’s backfiller utilities, and checkpointed from time to time to the scrubber’s database (in the checked_range table).

Storage#

For the storage checker, a checking configuration must be created before being able to spawn a number of checkers.

A new configuration is created using the swh scrubber check init tool:

$ swh scrubber check init --object-type snapshot --nb-partitions 65536 --name chk-snp
Created configuration chk-snp [2] for checking snapshot in datastore storage postgresql

One (or more) checking worker can then be spawned by using the swh scrubber check storage command:

$ swh scrubber check storage chk-snp
[...]

Note

A configuration file is expected, as for most swh tools.

This file must have a scrubber section with the configuration of the scrubber database. For storage checking operations, this configuration file must also have a storage configuration section. See the swh-storage documentation for more details on this. A typical configuration file could look like:

scrubber:
  cls: postgresql
  db: postgresql://localhost/postgres?host=/tmp/tmpk9b4wkb5&port=9824

storage:
  cls: postgresql
  db: service=swh
  objstorage:
    cls: noop

Note

The configuration section scrubber_db has been renamed as scrubber in swh-scrubber version 2.0.0

Recovery#

Then, from time to time, jobs go through the list of known corrupt objects, and try to recover the original objects, through various means:

  • Brute-forcing variations until they match their checksum

  • Recovering from another data store

  • As a last resort, recovering from known origins, if any

Reinjection#

Finally, when an original object is recovered, it is reinjected in the original data store, replacing the corrupt one.