Please  let me know if my understanding is incorrect and I am designing it the 
wrong way? Any ideas will be helpful.

Thanks
-Parag

From: Dipti Mulay <[email protected]>
Date: Saturday, January 30, 2021 at 3:05 PM
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Ephemeral Nodes

Hi Flavio,

I am using the Zookeepers to do a leader election. The leader election needs to 
be done between entities which are actually a combination of active/stanb-by 
machines. The standby is a hot standby ready to take over when the active 
fails. Now when such a failure occurs I need to ensure that if the active 
system was the leader then the standby  system remains as leader when it takes 
over and becomes active. Now I can have both active and standby systems create 
their own ephemeral node. But that  will not guarantee that every time a 
failure happens on the active system the standby which is going to become 
active will assume the role of leader; that is because other ephemeral nodes 
might exist already.

I am hoping that I explained it properly.

Thanks for bearing with me.
-Parag

On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 at 20:25, Flavio Junqueira 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
If the session expires, then you cannot reconnect to that session and the 
associated ephemerals should be deleted.

I'm not entirely clear why you want to preserve the ephemeral znode. The 
session expiring and the ephemeral being deleted is an indication that the 
active leadership has been released, which brings to me to the question of how 
the standby is checking whether the active is still up. If it is not by 
watching the ephemeral znode, then it must be by other means.

If you need multiple clients to know which client is active, then you might 
consider writing an id to a persistent znode. That alone won't be sufficient, 
though.

-Flavio

> On 29 Jan 2021, at 15:03, Dipti Mulay 
> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> In his mail Ben said "when the session expires, the ephemeral nodes will
> get deleted. if your standby system reconnects to zookeeper with the
> clientid, the session will not expire and the ephemeral nodes will stay
> active."
> Are you suggesting that I can re-connect on a session that has already
> expired..? Won't the eph node get deleted when the session expires?
>
> On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 at 18:33, Dipti Mulay 
> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>> Hi Ben, Flavio,
>>
>> Thanks for your replies.
>>
>> I have tried coding it in a way that when standby takes over from the
>> active system only then it will establish a session with ZK server using
>> the same client id. But there is a small window of time when both systems
>> have an active session.
>> What I want to happen is that when standby takes over and active goes down
>> the ephemeral node should remain intact. The reason being that if the
>> active server was the "leader" then after the standby takes over I would
>> like the standby to remain as leader.
>> I have tried it many ways but as soon as the standby takes over and socket
>> from the old active closes the ephemeral node is deleted and triggers
>> leader election again.
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> Thanks
>> -Parag
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 at 13:26, Flavio Junqueira 
>> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>>> Yeah, what Ben said... What you might want to do is something along the
>>> lines of:
>>>
>>> 1- Have a client create the ephemeral znode, let's call it say "/active"
>>> 2- The other client acting as a standby sets a watch on "/active"
>>> 3- If the active node crashes, then "/active" is removed and the standby
>>> is notified and can become active by creating the "/active" znode
>>>
>>> Would that solve your problem?
>>>
>>> -Flavio
>>>
>>>> On 29 Jan 2021, at 07:44, Benjamin Reed 
>>>> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> can you explain a bit more what you mean by "The  zookeeper-client
>>>> process on standby which uses the same clientid to initialize a
>>>> session with zookeeper." ? if i understand correctly, you are going to
>>>> have two clients using the same session which cannot happen. do you
>>>> only reuse the clientid when the takeover occurs (the other node stops
>>>> using the session)?
>>>>
>>>> when the session expires, the ephemeral nodes will get deleted. if
>>>> your standby system reconnects to zookeeper with the clientid, the
>>>> session will not expire and the ephemeral nodes will stay active.
>>>>
>>>> ben
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 3:20 AM Dipti Mulay 
>>>> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi Flavio,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your inputs let me say what I am trying to do:
>>>>>
>>>>> I have an active- standby system, each of these system is running on
>>> its own VM.
>>>>>
>>>>> The zookpeeper client process which communicates with ZK is running
>>> even on the stanby system. The active system creates a session with ZK  and
>>> also creates a ephemeral node, I use the zoo_client_id() call to get the
>>> clientId_t information.
>>>>> The active system then passes on this ClientID_t to standby system(
>>> this is done by a memory shadow mechanism we have). The  zookeeper-client
>>> process on standby which uses the same clientid to initialize a session
>>> with zookeeper.
>>>>>
>>>>> Now after some time I turn of the active VM. On the stanby I see logs
>>> which tell me a socket error happened and I get a session expired event
>>> upon which I close the zookeeper session.  Does the session expire even
>>> also mean that my ephemeral is now gone? The standard error handling in my
>>> code is that when a session expired event is received I call
>>> zookeeper_close() which will surely remove the ephemeral node.
>>>>> Is there a way to preserve the ephemeral node and re-connect the
>>> session ?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>> -Parag
>>>>> P.S: I hope I have clearly explained the problem
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/26/21, 8:17 PM, "Flavio Junqueira" 
>>>>> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>   Hi Parag,
>>>>>
>>>>>   Typically, the application knows the path of the znode that it
>>> wants to check. Knowing the path, you can, for example, check the znode
>>> metadata, which includes the session id indicating the owner in the case of
>>> an ephemeral znode.
>>>>>
>>>>>   -Flavio
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 26 Jan 2021, at 03:07, Dipti Mulay 
>>>>>> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi All,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I had a question regarding ephemeral nodes. Given a particular
>>> client_id can zookeeper return me the ephemeral node corresponding to the
>>> provided client_id?
>>>>>> I am using the C Client Library and I could not find a way ?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Any suggestions ?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>> -Parag
>>>>>
>>>
>>>

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