On Mon, 2011-04-04 at 11:44 -0500, Neil Aggarwal wrote:

> >From what I can figure out from the ha.cf file, heartbeat 
> uses ping to tell if the peer is up.

Not really. It uses special heartbeat packets to tell if the peer is up.
Ping is used to tell the difference between a dead peer and a bad NIC or
cable. If the NIC or cable is bad, the remote peer would not respond,
but also neither would any of the ping targets. The other node would see
its remote node dead, but the ping targets alive, so it would know to
take over resources. This is a crude method of avoiding split brain
compared to a real STONITH device, but it works surprisingly well in a
number of situations. We ran a number of critical services on
heartbeat-v1 clusters for years until we switched over to using
Pacemaker last year when it became obvious that no one is supporting
heartbeat-v1 configurations any more (we were dragged kicking and
screaming into the much more complicated but also much more flexible and
reliable world of Pacemaker).

> 
> I want to switch the virtual IP if the ldirectord process 
> is not running or locked up.  That may happen even if the
> network card is ok.
> 
> Is there a way to do that?

You don't say whether or not you are using Pacemaker. If you are, then
you can set up ldirectord as a Pacemaker resource and let Pacemaker
handle the monitoring. If you are not doing that, then you will need
something external to do the monitoring. That is basically a limitation
of heartbeat-v1 resources in general; the individual resources are not
monitored, so it is possible to get into a situation where one or more
resources are hung or crashed, but the heartbeat is still running so no
failover occurs. The only solutions to that involve some sort of
external monitor outside heartbeat (of which Pacemaker seems to be the
recommended one).

--Greg


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