I am a newbie. Trying to setup a hdfs system to serve my data (I don't plan to use mapreduce) at my lab.

So far I have read, cluster setup in but I am still confused. Several questions:

• Do I need to have a secondary namenode?
• There are 2 files, masters and slaves. Do I really need these 2 files eventhough I just want hdfs? If I need them, what should go in there? I assume my namenode in masters and datanodes as slaves? Do I need slaves nodes
• What configuration files are needed for namenode, secondary namenode, datanode and client? (I assume core-site.xml is needed for all 4)? In addition, can someone suggest a good configuration model? sample configuration for namenode, secondary namenode, datanode, and the client would be very helpful.

I am getting confused because it seems most of the documentation assumes I want to use map-reduce which isn't the case.