When I read on the internetz that Alex Davies was about the publish a Packt book on MySQL HA I pinged my contacts at Packt and suggested that I'd review the book .

I've ran into Alex at some UKUUG conferences before and he's got a solid background on MySQL Cluster and other HA alternatives so I was looking forward to reading the book.

Alex starts of with a couple of indepth chapters on MySQL Cluster, he does mention that it's not a fit for all problems, but I'd hoped he did it a bit more prominently ... an upfront chapter outlining the different approaches and when which approach is a match could have been better. The avid reader now might be 80 pages into MySQL cluster before he realizes it's not going to be a match for his problem.

I really loved …

Thanks primarily to the efforts of Senko Rašić and Ante Karamatić, the Pacemaker cluster stack is being augmented with support for Upstart services. This is in addition to support for OCF resource agents and LSB/SysV init scripts, both of which have been supported in Pacemaker for years.

This is functionality now present in the upstream Mercurial trees, and we need testers to get in shape for release. Yes, that means you can help!

This is primarily relevant to you if you use a distribution with upstart as its default init daemon. This includes Ubuntu lucid, …

This year’s Linux Plumbers Conference is taking place November 3-5, in Cambridge, MA, United States. The CfP is already closed and the program is due any day now, but the co-located miniconference on high availability clustering is still accepting proposals. This is your chance to get involved!

So if you plan to attend Plumbers or just happen to be in the area, please submit your talk! Miniconference talks are not expected to be full-blown presentations. Instead, you can float an …

A little while back we did a webinar on using Pacemaker to fully automate MySQL replication. We now have a recording of that webinar available from our web site.

A couple of new webinar recordings are available from our web site:

• Upgrading to Pacemaker on Debian squeeze tells you all there is to know about upgrading to the Pacemaker cluster manager on the upcoming Debian release, “squeeze”.
• High Availability for Oracle databases shows you how to leverage the Linux cluster stack to deploy highly available Oracle databases.

Like our live webinars, the recordings are of course free of charge. Enjoy!

…

While Yves presents a valid approach for managing NDB with Pacemaker and the anything Linux-HA resource agent (a generic wrapper for any daemon based application), the XML configuration shown is likely to have people running away screaming. This is how we had to do things back in the Heartbeat 2 days, which meant that as a cluster admin you would permanently run around with a loaded cocked shotgun with the muzzle pressed firmly against your foot.

Those days are long gone. Please don’t do this anymore. You also no longer need to use the low-level tools such as cibadmin or crm_attribute.

We have the crm shell …

Just in case you haven’t noticed, Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” has arrived. I upgraded my personal box over the weekend, and am happy to report that things went pretty flawlessly for me. So I’m now a happy lucid user.

What’s more important for the ever-growing cluster community is the fact that this LTS release comes with built-in support for the Pacemaker cluster stack — and indeed, it’s the first commercially-supported distribution that comes with support for both the Heartbeat and the Corosync cluster messaging layer. And it’s easy, too!

Here’s how I install the Pacemaker stack with Heartbeat (which I prefer) on an Ubuntu box:

aptitude …

MySQL replication support for the Pacemaker cluster manager (the stuff that we explained in this webinar) has made it into the Linux-HA resource agents default branch. If you are interested in testing — and you should! — please read the extended announcement. Feedback is extremely welcome on the linux-ha-dev mailing list.

We are expecting to release this as part of resource-agents 1.0.4, in late May/early June. …

We’re sticking with databases for our current round of webinars. Up next is an overview of Oracle high availability clustering on Linux.

In this 45-minute presentation, we will show you how to quickly and easily configure an Oracle database with an associated TNS Listener in a failover configuration, how to monitor both your database and your listener for failures, and how to have Pacemaker automatically intervene and recover from outages.

Brought to you in association with our friends over at Novell, we’ll showcase Oracle in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension.

This webinar is scheduled for April 28, 2010 at 1500 UTC.

As all of our webinars, this one requires registration — but we’ve made things easier for you. …

I just got word that a talk about iSCSI High Availability with Pacemaker and DRBD, which I submitted for LinuxTag 2010, has been accepted by the selection committee.

The presentation is entitled Storage Done Right: Building a Resilient, Distributed, Highly Available Open Source iSCSI SAN and I will talk in the Storage track, in English. Questions in German, of course, won’t be a problem.

As the conference organizers have asked speakers not to publicize the temporary schedule (for obvious reasons — hey it’s temporary), I can’t give the exact time and location yet. But if you want to hear about how you can replace your six-figure SAN with something much more open, much less locked-in and much less expensive, plan a trip to Berlin in early …