I hadn’t looked into the cluster world since the last time we configured our cluster for SuSE 10.3 last year. Major groundswells, sinkholes, and shifts seem to have opened up … to the point where things aren’t even called the same anymore.

The big difference is that EVMS is apparently deprecated — even though it’s still listed on the linux-ha projects list, according to the EVMS wikipedia page, development was stopped sometime after 2.5.5 was released in Feb06. That’s a long time ago in internet years.

To get my own brain in the right place: Pacemaker split off from Heartbeat in order to give the whole architecture better … architecture. Pacemaker’s the cluster manager, in the place of the previous clm. OpenAIS/Corosync is one engine (Corosync is the engine itself, OpenAIS is the service plugins to the engine) and Heartbeat is another.

Now… according to the OpenSuSE Mailing List, EVMS is being officially abandoned in place of clvmd, openais, and pacemaker. And indeed, the packages are available in OpenSuSE 11.1, although as I noted a few days ago, the SLES11 High-Availability Extension … isn’t available. If that isn’t irony, I dunno what is. Word on a release date is soon ™… and that was last month. From the current buzz, it went from being “weeks” last month to “it’s in release candidate” this month to “it might be available in at least a month or so”… which means it’s still vapor at this point unless you’re lucky enough to be a Novell Beta partner. We’re not, unfortunately, no matter how good of guinea pigs we may be.

Idle Speculation: It’s probably a bear to provide support on to clueless ex-Netware graybeards, and developing support documentation and scripts for phone monkies takes time and money. My guess is that they’re boiling it down a bit more before they release it to the general public because it just isn’t quite ready for prime time use.

I got the packages all set up and installed on my test mule yesterday… Monday I’ll hook up a second box and see how things go. For now, we’re running everything critical that we can on SLES11 (ex: our new database server, which I just brought into production today)… but running everything else on OpenSuSE. We’ll slowly upgrade from 10.3 to SLES11 where we can, and OpenSuSE 11.1 on the hosts that need to be clvm-aware.

For a little bit longer lifespan, we were pondering using SLES11, which just came out. It’s got a number of package differences — more updated and heavily tested software, just like SLES 10sp2 is superior in many ways to OpenSuSE 10.3 and in some cases 11 when you’re just looking at package versions. We also liked the idea that it might be a bit more tested and a bit less “Your mission critical application is my 2nd year undergraduate Google Summer of Code” …

I expected the SLES install to go a lot more easily than it did. There’s a few weird default settings (such as using a bridged network interface by default, which I couldn’t get to work at all) and the selections of what kind of host to build don’t seem to make a lot of sense, as they typically install the same exact things.

Unfortunately, we’re missing a vital piece for our current operating structure. At the moment, we make heavy use of OCFS2 and Heartbeat (aka Pacemaker) for EVMS. We’re moving away from EVMS since development has stopped/stalled on it, but it’s still necessary right now with some of the automated provisioning tools we use. With heartbeat still necessary, it was rather dissapointing to find out that Novell hasn’t released packages for SLES11 yet… they’ll be released as part of the High Availability Extension, which ironically enough, is not yet available.

Today’s chore: Figure out if we can get up and running fast enough without those toys, or if we have to “fall back” to OpenSuSE.

Problem: Audio doesn’t work when the machine is docked in a Dell dock.
Solution: You need to enable the IEC958 Switch in your Volume Control application.

HowTo:

1. Click Computer, More Applications, and Voume Control
2. Click Edit, Preferences, and check IEC958. Then click Close.
3. Switch from the Playback tab to the Switches tab, and check the IEC958 checkbox.

I also clicked the IEC958 Default PCM box on my OpenSuSE 11 machine; this gave me control over the dock’s specific output port as opposed to the headphone port on the laptop.

You’ll want to read this article to pick which version you want, and if you choose one of the CGE (Carrier Grade) builds, then you’ll want to read this article on how to build the CGE editions from source and distribute them.

Sorry about the pause in Zend Framework tutorials, they’ll be back soon. I’ve been absolutely slammed in all other walks of life.

1. Add the Telephony network repository in YaST2. The URL is http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/telephony/openSUSE_10.3/ …

2. There’s a bug in the deps for Asterisk with mISDNuser (the version in the repository is more recent, but is “uninstallable”) that will block the install process… so as a workaround, first, type zypper install zaptel. Then download mISDN-1_1_5-3.5.i586.rpm and mISDNuser-1_1_5-2.4.i586.rpm and install them with rpm -ihv mISDN*.rpm.