Before you run pvfs2-server for the first time, you must run it with a special argument that tells it to create a new storage space if it does not already exist. In this example, we must run the server as root in order to create a storage space in /pvfs2-storage-space as specified in the configuration files.
bash-2.05b# /usr/sbin/pvfs2-server /etc/pvfs2-fs.conf -f
Once the above step is done, you can start the server in normal mode as follows:
bash-2.05b# /usr/sbin/pvfs2-server /etc/pvfs2-fs.conf
All log messages will be directed to /tmp/pvfs2-server.log, unless you specified a different location while running pvfs2-genconfig. If you would prefer to run pvfs2-server in the foreground and direct all messages to stderr, then you may run the server as follows:
bash-2.05b# /usr/sbin/pvfs2-server /etc/pvfs2-fs.conf -d
On startup, the PVFS2 server uses the hostname of the machine that it is running on to determine necessary information from the configuration file. If the hostname doesn't match any of the addresses specified in the config file, then then you must use the -a option. For example, each of above command lines could include ``-a testhost'' to specify that the server is using the testhost alias in the configuration file.