Some time ago it became apparent that we would require environmental monitoring in our server room. The primary reason being that our server room was never initially intended to be a server room and the after-the-fact A/C unit installation (size, vent placement, etc.) is definitely less than optimal. Not to mention the A/C unit is likely overloaded as well, judging by some of the data we gathered after installing the environmental monitoring equipment and software. Basically, I needed to be made aware of any potential problems with the environment in that room so that should anything go wrong, I can act quickly. A secondary use of the data is to trend the environment changes in order to reveal specific patterns that may help with long-term planning.
Author: rthomson
Time Navigator HA Cluster Agent Configuration
I’ve been wanting to post about a configuration that allows for seamless file-level backup of storage attached to an active/passive high availability cluster in an uninterrupted fashion using Atempo’s Time Navigator and I’m finally going to do it.
The Problem
The initial difficulty lies in the requirement that the data must be consistently backed up at every interval, no matter which cluster node is currently the active node with the backend storage mounted. To do this, an agent is required to be configured as a cluster resource in order to “follow” the mounting/exporting of the storage to any cluster node. So in order to accomplish this,  N + 1 tina agents are required. That is, if you have two cluster nodes, you need three agents to successfully backup each node with the local agent and the storage, as it floats about the cluster nodes depending on failure or migration events.
Luckily for me, the good people at Atempo have engineered the agent in such a way that multiple agents can be ran on a single node, each binding to it’s own IP address and each individually controlled via it’s own init script. Of course, we need to make some file edits to make all this happen and that’s what I’m going share!
Life Support!
Wow! A whole 2.75 months and nothing new on techslaves… things are getting boring around here!
I’ve been itching to make some new posts but work has picked up lately. I’m working on a new project I started as a collaboration with a large IT group here on campus. There is lots of exciting stuff going on with the project and when it’s all said and done, I’m going to share valuable things I learned along the way.
Just to force myself to finally write about it, I’m going to list the vague project key points and then I’ll just have no choice but to follow up or let everyone (read: myself) down:
- Setup OpenLDAP w/ TLS, syncrepl, LAM
- Migrate existing NIS directory to LDAP
- NFS and Samba (security = user) migration to High Availability w/ Heartbeat/Pacemaker/DRBD
- iSCSI SAN storage w/ multipath and HBAs
- Large data consolidation (4TB+) from multiple sources
- Support Windows XP,Vista,7 and Ubuntu 8,9,10 and Centos 4,5 clients w/ automount in LDAP on all Linux clients.
We’re targeting an end date of August 31st, wish me luck. Beans will be spilled!
Next project down the line might be back with my group going one-up on this configuration by implementing FreeIPA v2 for it’s slick Kerberos, HBAC and (hopefully) sudo policy integration. FreeIPA does raise some new questions but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
Stay hungry, techslaves.