Updated OCF Resource Agent Developer’s Guide now available

I have just published an updated OCF Resource Agent Developer’s Guide. This guide is the definitive handbook for authors of, and contributors to, resource agents for the Pacemaker based Linux High Availability stack.

Upstart support coming to Pacemaker

Thanks primarily to the efforts of Senko Rašić and Ante Karamatić, the Pacemaker cluster stack is being augmented with support for Upstart services. This is in addition to support for OCF resource agents and LSB/SysV init scripts, both of which have been supported in Pacemaker for years.

This is functionality now present in the upstream Mercurial trees, and we need testers to get in shape for release. Yes, that means you can help!

This is primarily relevant to you if you use a distribution with upstart as its default init daemon. This includes Ubuntu lucid, OpenSuSE 11.3, recent Fedora releases, and others. To enable upstart support, you will need an upstream hg tip for the cluster-glue libraries, and for Pacemaker.

Here’s how I build cluster-glue with upstart support from local hg checkouts:

hg clone http://hg.linux-ha.org/glue cluster-glue
cd cluster-glue
./autogen.sh
# Next step is important: must include --enable-upstart to enable upstart support
./configure --enable-upstart
make
sudo make install

… and then I simply continue like I normally would for a Pacemaker from-source install, as illustrated here.

When I’m done, and have configured my Heartbeat/Pacemaker cluster as shown here, I can proceed with adding an Upstart based job to my cluster configuration:

crm configure
primitive mysql upstart:mysql \
  op start timeout=120s
  op stop timeout=120s
  op monitor interval=30s
commit

And that’s it! Now I can use the mysql upstart job like any other cluster resource. Try it out — and please report back any issues you encounter!

Upcoming High Availability Clustering miniconf at Linux Plumbers Conference

This year’s Linux Plumbers Conference is taking place November 3-5, in Cambridge, MA, United States. The CfP is already closed and the program is due any day now, but the co-located miniconference on high availability clustering is still accepting proposals. This is your chance to get involved!

So if you plan to attend Plumbers or just happen to be in the area, please submit your talk! Miniconference talks are not expected to be full-blown presentations. Instead, you can float an idea in just a 5-10 minute talk and then stimulate a vibrant group discussion.

Even if you are not attending, you can still help! We are always eager to hear from our user community. What HA problems are you currently facing that the existing Linux clustering stack does not solve? How well does your application integrate with HA? Where can we improve? What’s already good, and can be made better? What sucks?

Feel free to comment below. Or send us an email on one of the mailing lists. Or grab us in #linux-ha or #linux-cluster on freenode. Make yourself heard!

Automating MySQL replication with Pacemaker

A little while back we did a webinar on using Pacemaker to fully automate MySQL replication. We now have a recording of that webinar available from our web site.

New webinar recordings available

A couple of new webinar recordings are available from our web site:

• Upgrading to Pacemaker on Debian squeeze tells you all there is to know about upgrading to the Pacemaker cluster manager on the upcoming Debian release, “squeeze”.
• High Availability for Oracle databases shows you how to leverage the Linux cluster stack to deploy highly available Oracle databases.

Like our live webinars, the recordings are of course free of charge. Enjoy!