[Linuxha-users] Update on Linuxha.net 0.8.3 progress

[Michael Mansour]

Hi Simon,

Change is never a bad thing especially when there's much benefit to it. I'm 
starting the build of my production cluster this week, and I was conerned that 
with v0.8.2 the networking wouldn't have worked as well as I wanted it to. 
I'll explain as follows.

I want 3 network cards in each machine, 2 for the "client" network, and 1 for 
the "drbd" network. Each network card I have so far is 10/100Mbps running at 
100Mbps full duplex. However, to allow for fast transmission of the drbd 
packets and writes to the standby node, I have purchased 2x 1Gbps network 
cards to replace the 100Mbps FD cards for the drbd network. As I have no need 
to go to the expense of purchasing a gigabit switch, I decided to just use a 
cross-over cable between the 1gbps cards. At this point, I started to think 
how I would allow traffic to flow through between the drbd network, and I 
believe the best way to do this would be to have that in a separate subnet to 
the main network.

I believe the changes you have made in 0.8.3 will allow this yes?

Michael.

> Hello all,
> 	Just a quick update on progress of the Linuxha.net 0.8.3 release. I 
> am hoping this will be released in the next day or so. However 
> rather than the online file system size change support 0.8.3 will be 
> shipped with a completely new networking sub-system. I deemed these 
> changes necessary due to several limitations of the previous code, 
including;
> 
> [1] No clear division between cluster and application configuration
> files for the cluster network topology settings.
> 
> [2] The fail-over response was taking too long (up to 3 seconds).
> 
> [3] The code made use of multiple IP addresses on the same subnet -
> which is not considered a good thing.
> 
> [4] The application was only able to apply IP addresses on one card and
> on one subnet on that card.
> 
> The new code addresses all these problems and overall results in
> improved fail-over times, reduced code size and a more logical
> separation between application and cluster configuration information.
> 
> These changes are handled by having a separate network monitoring daemon
> which is always running when the main cluster daemon runs on a node.
> 
> How does this all affect existing applications? Well changes with
> existing configurations of both the cluster and application
> configuration files will be necessary - but the changes are not huge,
> for example in the cluster configuration file you now define "networks"
> - groups of cards that can provide IP addresses on the same subnet, i.e;
> 
>         <node>
>                 <name>server1.linuxha.net</name>
>                 <network name="main" cards="eth0,eth1"/>
>                 <network name="drbd" cards="eth2"/>
>         </node>
>         <node>
>                 <name>server2.linuxha.net</name>
>                 <network name="main" cards="eth0,eth1"/>
>                 <network name="drbd" cards="eth2"/>
>         </node>
> 
> It is possible to define 0,1 or more networks and call them whatever 
> you wish (here called "main" and "drbd").
> 
> In the application configuration file the network section might look
> like the following;
> 
>         <networks>
>                 <network net="main" ip="192.168.0.102,103"
>                         checklist="192.168.0.1" checkpercent="100"
>                         pingtype="icmp" pingtimeout="3"/>
>                 <network net="drbd" ip="192.168.100.12"/>
>         </networks>
> 
> In the above example the application hosted two IP addresses on the
> "main" network and actually one on the "drbd" network. Now an
> application can defined 0, 1 or more IP addresses - and these can be 
> on multiple networks as well. Notice that you do not define the 
> cards that can be used - all topology information is now handled at 
> the cluster level to keep the application configuration as 
> straightforward as possible.
> 
> The above is a sample of the changes - one or two other changes will 
> be necessary but shortly after the code is released I'll provide suitable
> documentation to migrate.
> 
> Although a big change I believed it was necessary to ensure that the
> version 1.0.0 reaches the quality I wish it to.
> 
> Regards,
> Simon.
> 
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