Hi all. I'm investigating an HA environment with a simple active/standby configuration, just two nodes in a cluster with DRBD to provide a shared partition (using standard Red Hat EL 6.2 packages, such as heartbeat 2.1.2 and DRBD 8.4).
These servers have multiple network interfaces: an internal private network, over which DRBD, heartbeat, etc. are run, and also a separate set of interfaces to provide "customer" access. The internal interfaces have static IP addresses and unchanging hostnames. The external interfaces do NOT: those interfaces are owned by the "customer", not by the cluster. They might use DHCP to get IP addresses, and it's important that the hostnames of the systems, when the customer runs "uname" etc., be _their_ hostname and not the internal hostname of the cluster. Users of the system must be free to change these values. I'm frustrated trying to get this to work robustly with heartbeat. Explaining why the entire system must be brought down and restarted merely to change the hostname is somewhat embarrassing as well. If I could get heartbeat to use my internal, forever-constant names rather than the results of "uname -n" my system would work so much more smoothly and reliably, provide more uptime, and require a lot less effort from me. Because this is a working environment, moving to completely different technology like corosync is not really feasible. I found a thread from 2004 discussing the (then?) undocumented support for the "/etc/ha.d/nodeinfo" file with heartbeat. This seems like the obviously correct solution. I can't find any information on this subject more current than that thread, though. Is this feature still available/supported? Does it work with DRBD as well? Is it something I can rely on going forward, insofar as heartbeat is still supported? I must confess myself somewhat taken aback to read in that 2004 thread a robust defense of the idea that "uname -n" would be the sole true infallible identifier for a node. Hostnames may be relied upon to be unique _at any given moment_, yes, but they are a very far ways from being _constants_. They do change. While it's useful for status output, logs, etc. to utilize hostnames as user-readable identifiers, a design using an internal (constant) identifier for nodes in the cluster seems to me to be far more reliable and straightforward to manage. I'm no HA guru however; is there a technical reason why this is difficult or sub-optimal? _______________________________________________________ Linux-HA-Dev: Linux-HA-Dev@lists.linux-ha.org http://lists.linux-ha.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-ha-dev Home Page: http://linux-ha.org/
