- This week I spent most days in Nuremberg to catch up with colleagues and friends, have lunch, have dinner, and attend a few meetings. It's always good to meet in person from time to time.
Today, I would simply like to remind everyone about the easiness of getting daily builds of the Linux HA - heartbeat project. I provide them using the openSUSE Build Service for easy download: Try them here!
It goes without saying that you should not do that on your production cluster. However, it is a good idea to give these versions the occasional spin on your staging or test cluster.
If you do not yet have a test or staging cluster, you really should set one up; even though the Linux HA project as well as your distributor (say, Novell for SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 10) are rather careful about release testing, you should make extra sure before rolling something out into your High Availability setup, which is more than two thirds in the process; even though the software and hardware are important and required, they will be void at root's command ...
Nowadays, nobody has an excuse for not having a test or lab cluster - with virtualization, Xen, vmware, qemu, Lguest ..., one of those idle machines everybody has around becomes an instant cluster.
What's in it for you:
Some more words of wisdom: Why the Linux HA v2 configuration sucks
First, we know about that. Novell has contributed substantial, freely available documentation on the web, and we will work to continue and enhance it, with the goal of incorporating it into the upstream project. And of course, if you think the public Linux-HA.org website sucks^Wleaves a lot to be desired, it is build automatically from this wiki here, so we look forward to your cleanups and contributions.
However, the main gripe is that Linux HA v2 is complicated to configure. And that gripe is well founded. You see, originally, we had planned that there would be good commandline and GUI tools which would assist the admin. But, due to reorganizations in one of the larger companies contributing to the project, the team working on those was effectively pulled about one to one-and-a-half year into the project, just when they were starting to get really effective.
The XML-based "configuration" format is, in fact, a declarative language fed to the Policy Engine (a solver). It describes objects (resources and nodes), their dependencies, and the current state of the cluster. If it feels to users as if they are programming, it is because they are. It is not more complex than a scripting language, so any admin should be able to learn it quickly, but it is not something picked up in an hour. We will continue to enhance it going forward of course, but it was never meant to be easy: we had expected smart front-ends, so the back-end could focus on its task.
Andrew has actually started an Eclipse-based GUI (called Pacemaker). I am sure that he would appreciate help, because I keep him busy on the back-end ;-) We would also welcome someone to work on a consistent CLI shell.
So, if you think the Linux HA v2 software is hard to use, we are looking forward to receiving patches from you!
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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