Backup server for HOBBIT
I have searched the HOBBIT archive but cannot find anything on setting up a hot standby HOBBIT server that receives input from the clients along with the primary server but does not send out alerts unless the primary server goes down. Any howto's on this? Thanks in advance for any help/hints. Winn
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On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 12:38:09PM -0700, Winn Beutler wrote:
I have searched the HOBBIT archive but cannot find anything on setting up a hot standby HOBBIT server that receives input from the clients along with the primary server but does not send out alerts unless the primary server goes down. Any howto's on this?
I don't think a *hot* standby has been discussed much.
It should be fairly simple. On the standby server, you just disable the [bbpage] task (running hobbitd_alert) until the primary server is down. When that occurs, change the hobbitlaunch.cfg file to have the bbpage task enabled, and alerts will start to flow.
The trick of course is to detect when the primary server is down; how you do that depends on the setup you have. If there is some sort of clustering software installed it might be very simple; if not, you'll have to rely on some sort of connectivity between the two hosts and their checking of each other.
The only problem I see is that when the backup server starts the hobbitd_alert module, it will see all alerts as being "new", so there might be an initial burst of alerts because all of the info about when to repeat an alert is lost. If you can share the ~hobbit/server/tmp/ directory between the servers (e.g. it is on a SAN storage) then that will not happen, because the backup server will pickup the checkpoint files that stores this information across restarts of Hobbit.
Regards, Henrik
I created two custom scripts, partly because I wanted to know how to do it, and partly because I have not seen anything that does quite what I was looking for. One of our DBAs wrote some SQL code that connects to a database to check it is up, in addition to my normal checking for pmon and other key processes using 'procs'. That works just the way it should.
I have also had a few problems with a switch being reset or individual ports acting strangely which caused some of my servers to drop from 100Mbit full duplex to 100-half, or even to 10-full. Because this affects LAN performance, especially remote backups using NetBackup master/client configs, I want to know if any servers switch from 100-full.
I found some inconsistencies between my RedHat AS 2.1, AS 3, and Fedora Core 3 and 4 servers because of different LAN adapters. mii-diag, mii-tool and ethtool are on all of my servers, and tend to give different results. I ended up trusting mii-diag more than ethtool but ethtool is the only one that runs on a few servers. I wrote an extension which sends me a yellow alert if any card drops from 100-full, or red if a card is not responding. Of course the card not responding is only useful if I have more than one LAN adapter configured, and I'll probably get other alerts anyway. Does anybody have a better (or for that matter any other) way of testing LAN card settings? Are there any other Linux tools than mii-diag, mii-tool and ethtool? Ideally, one program that can understand all devices rather than me having to use different ones on different servers.
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Allan.Marillier at dana.com wrote:
I found some inconsistencies between my RedHat AS 2.1, AS 3, and Fedora Core 3 and 4 servers because of different LAN adapters. mii-diag, mii-tool and ethtool are on all of my servers, and tend to give different results. I ended up trusting mii-diag more than ethtool but ethtool is the only one that runs on a few servers. I wrote an extension which sends me a yellow alert if any card drops from 100-full, or red if a card is not responding. Of course the card not responding is only useful if I have more than one LAN adapter configured, and I'll probably get other alerts anyway. Does anybody have a better (or for that matter any other) way of testing LAN card settings? Are there any other Linux tools than mii-diag, mii-tool and ethtool? Ideally, one program that can understand all devices rather than me having to use different ones on different servers.
The reason for the different tools is due to the ethernet kernel drivers supporting different APIs. SIOCETHTOOL (ethtool) is the newer API with SIOCGMIIREG (mii-diag) the elder.
Maybe this tool will help: http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/ifplugd/ifplugstatus.8.xml
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participants (4)
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Allan.Marillier＠dana.com
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henrik＠hswn.dk
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mike＠razorsedge.org
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Winn.Beutler＠mcdata.com