undoing metadata mirroring

[Paul Weakliem]

All,

We have a small BeeGFS system with a buddy mirror pair for the metadata
servers, and a couple of storage servers (that are not mirrored).  For a
variety of reasons, we had stopped using the buddy mirroring, and we had
simply turned off one of the metad's, so that we see (in 'beegfs-df') is
one metadata server in 'normal' mode, and one in 'emergency' and the
filesystem has been working fine for us.

We're at the point of needing to upgrade the software (we're at 7.1.5!),
but the docs say all targets need to be in the good state before an
upgrade.  Since we no longer use the metadata mirroring, I'd like to
simply remove the unused metadata server.  There is a
'removemirrorgroup' flag in 'beegfs-ctl', but in our version, the
command says that removal of metadata mirrors isn't yet implemented.

Perhaps the cleanest way to do this is, bring the unused metadata server
back up and resync (which likely will take a while!), then we can update
(once everything is in a 'Good' state) to a version where
'removemirrorgroup' will work for metadata servers?

Or - (seems unlikely?) - is there a way to manually remove the unused
metadata server (so we don't need to resync only to remove the unused
metad server)?   But there's also no obvious references to specific
servers, etc. in the conf files, so I'm guessing the settings for that
are buried too deep to manually unwind?

Thanks for any insights/thoughts,
Paul