Updated Linux Cluster Stack packages for Ubuntu 10.04

I’m proud to announce the availability of updated Linux Cluster Stack packages for Ubuntu 10.04 („Lucid Lynx“).

Since its release in April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Codename: Lucid Lynx) has collected a large number of fans. Straight from the beginning, it has been a very good choice for system administrators looking for a reliable and well-maintained server operating system. Despite its age, it remains a rock-solid and well working server platform with many new installations every day.

18 months, however, are a long time under the rules of information technology. And many software components shipped with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS have seen numerous improvements within the last one and a half years. A good example for this is the Linux Cluster stack: Its core components (Corosync / Heartbeat, cluster-glue, resource agents, Pacemaker) have been thoroughly updated and improved since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS came to life. Until now, system administrators had to choose between an up-to-date cluster stack and the stability provided by the current Ubuntu LTS release. These days are now over.

Updated cluster packages for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS are available to the general public, effective immediately. They were created by the Ubuntu HA Maintainers group and have been thoroughly checked for compatibility with the versions included in the original 10.04 LTS release. This update includes:

• Corosync 1.4.2
• Heartbeat 3.0.5
• cluster-glue 1.0.8
• resource-agents 3.9.2
• Pacemaker 1.1.6

For compatibility with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the following further packages are also included in the PPA:

• Redhat Cluster Suite (RHCS) 3.0.12 (with GFS2)
• OCFS2 1.6.3
• LVM 2.02.54 (with CLVM)

Sponsorship

The creation of these packages was sponsored significantly by hastexo. hastexo is the company I work for; headquartered in Austria, the company is mainly active on the field of High Availability consulting. If you want to know more about hastexo or need help with your HA setup, please visit our website at http://www.hastexo.com/. If things are urgent, we can help you within 15 minutes!

To receive first-hand notifications on important HA subjects or on future package updates, you may also subscribe to our Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/hastexo) or like us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/hastexo).

Acknowledgement

I would like to take the opportunity and send a big „thank you“ to Andres Rodriguez and Ante Karamatic, both were incredibly helpful while creating these packages and getting them online.

Installation

If you want to use the updated Cluster Stack packages, you can do so by installing them from the Ubuntu HA Maintainers‘ public PPA repository. Rolling updates are supported. In order to update your cluster stack in a rolling way, first, put your cluster into maintenance mode:

crm configure property maintenance-mode=true

After this command,

crm_mon -1 -rf

should list all resources as unmanaged. Be warned: As long as your cluster is in this mode, pacemaker will completely ignore your resources and will not touch them at all, not even if one of your resources crashes. Should that happen during the update, manual intervention is required.

The next step in the upgrade process is to stop corosync or heartbeat (depending on your setup) with

service corosync stop

or

service heartbeat stop

Then, add the Ubuntu HA Maintainers PPA repository to your system configuration and update the lists of available packages:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-ha-maintainers/ppa
sudo apt-get update

(Please note: Should the „add-apt-repository“ tool not be available on your system, install the package python-software-properties to get it).

Finally, deploy the update by doing

apt-get dist-upgrade

If this has worked out properly,

crm_mon -1 -rf

should look like it previously did, except for th the „Version:“ entry, which should now look like this: „Version: 1.1.6-9971ebba4494012a93c03b40a2c58ec0eb60f50c“.

Don’t forget to disable the maintenance mode! This is done with

crm configure property maintenance-mode=false

Future cooperation

The members of the Ubuntu HA Maintainers team and the Debian HA Maintainers have agreed to cooperate more closely in the future to assure the best possible quality of package for users of both distributions. This will result in measures to keep the packages strictly in sync between Debian and Ubuntu.

The first milestone for this cooperation will be the integration of RedHat Cluster Suite (RHCS) 3.1 into Debian and Ubuntu. We are eagerly looking forward to provide a CMAN-enabled Pacemaker to replace the old RHCS 3.0 framework as soon as possible. This feature will certainly make it into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and the next stable Debian release. As soon as the work on it has been finished, we will also backport these changes to the then-stable Debian version (probably Squeeze via squeeze-backports) and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

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