[ale] Linux HA

Mike Harrison meuon at geeklabs.com
Wed Oct 31 18:05:30 EDT 2007


> FYI: The heartbeat team basically considers stonith mandatory for any
> real production servers.

For Windows machines maybe..

I just yanked a Linux box out of colo
just cause it was time for the HD's to fail,
No, nothing wrong, but it went online in November 2003.
That's 4 years of uptime for a RedHat 9 based server. 
I just figured it was time for new hardware. I let the new machine
"burn in" for a month before I swapped 50+ domains to the replacement.

I've currently got (actually a clients) 11 others (BSD, Debian and Centos) 
that have been online without incident for just over a year, and then they 
got zapped with a reboot due to freak power outage at the colo this month. 
Darn, i was hoping to get a few years of uptime with them as well. But you 
do have to kill and re-animate TomCat every once in a while to keep it 
happy, so it made for some happy servers on reboot.

These are also considerations in picking your colo provider.
We had a weird failure a few months ago, needed to get on console
to fix things. Called the colo (Networks Inc, Chattanooga) a few buildings 
away, he said I'll meet you at the door in 5 minutes. They did,
and already had a keyboard and monitor plugged in. Good people make the 
world a much better place.

Note: their MS-server racks have KVM's... His Linux racks don't. I think 
that says a lot about how things work.

---------

Odd things many years ago: I helped setup a weird SCO server 
configuration for a telecom that used NICs that even mirrored their MAC 
addresses, and had a seperate set of NICs with a null ethernet cable
between them. Supposedly made the two systems exact mirrors, all database 
calls and other things were mirrored, and if one failed or weirded out,
it supposedly was killed by the other one. It needed a hub between it and 
the ethernet switches.. but there was some odd deamons it had running.

Wish I remembered more, cause it was an interesting way to provide uptime.











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