The development indicates that you need to setup a QuarkDB server first, but there is no mention of setting up a QuarkDB server at all in the quickstart. Why is it needed? Why does eos work without it?
The quickstart sets up authentication with just sss sec.protbind * only sss unix but the deployment guide has:
Initially, eos was developed with a in-memory namespace but we soon reached the limitation of that design so we needed to move out the NS component from the MGM daemon for multiple reasons.
It works for you without QuarkDB since the default is still to load the in-memory namespace. This is handled by the following config in /etc/xrd.cf.mgm:
Then for what authentication method you set up it’s up to you, you have several options like: krb5, gsi, sss or unix. You can find them explained in the link below.
You can run just one QuarkDB node for testing purposes you don’t need the full setup with three instances.
We plan to drop support for the in-memory namespace with eos version 5. The limitation of the in-memory namespace comes from the size of RAM required by the MGM since all the namespace in booted in memory, and actually the bootup time - reading the entries from the changelog files and constructing the c++ data structures. For example a 0.5B entries namespace can take up to 45-60 min to start up and requires hundreds (~500) for GB of RAM.
QuarkDB avoids these issue by relying on functionality provided by RocksDB which takes care of moving data from RAM to disk as necessary.