To: linux-ha@muc.de Subject: piranha announcement Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 22:26:24 -0400 From: wanger@redhat.com Ok, this is the less than stellar announcement of piranha. I want to get this out so that people can start telling me how broke things are. The non-gui stuff seems to be working pretty well. The gui <-> daemon glue seems to still have some config file corruption problems. Please don't start running your companies primary e-commerce site with this stuff yet as it still needs some development work. :) Here is the rough outline of this package. It is based on Wensong Zhang's Linux Virtual Server (LVS) kernel routing patch. It includes very simple heartbeating (over ethernet only right now) between 2 LVS nodes and has automatic fail over of all configuration and monitoring services. It has simple service monitoring for the real servers used behind the LVS router (port connection only right now). It also has a gui tool to manage things. These packages *should* work on RH 6.0 boxes that have a kernel running v0.8.3 of the lvs patch. The kernels contained in the lorax beta snap shots should suffice for this purpose. You won't be able to build from sources without many of the things in lorax (namely the popt stuff). You can get the bits on ftp://people.redhat.com/wanger/piranha piranha-0.1.4.tar.gz SRPMS/piranha-0.1.4-1.src.rpm alpha/piranha-0.1.4-1.alpha.rpm alpha/piranha-gui-0.1.4-1.alpha.rpm alpha/piranha-docs-0.1.4-1.alpha.rpm i386/piranha-0.1.4-1.i386.rpm i386/piranha-gui-0.1.4-1.i386.rpm i386/piranha-docs-0.1.4-1.i386.rpm sparc/piranha-0.1.4-1.sparc.rpm sparc/piranha-gui-0.1.4-1.sparc.rpm sparc/piranha-docs-0.1.4-1.sparc.rpm I have not tested (ok, I haven't even tried to install) the non-i386 packages, but, hey, they built cleanly. How bad can they be? :) Contained in the packages, you will find these important files: /usr/sbin/lvs /usr/sbin/nanny /usr/sbin/pulse /etc/rc.d/init.d/pulse Pulse is the main, controlling daemon that is started via the SysV style init script in /etc/rc.d/init.d/pulse. It makes calls to lvs which is the real controlling daemon for the LVS machine and the bit that reads in the magic /etc/lvs.cf file. BTW, there is a sample.cf file in /usr/doc/piranha-0.1.4/ which shows the basic organization of things. For the time being, we are really only supporting the NAT (Network Address Translation) method of routing. nanny is the client monitoring daemon that gets spawned off for each service being supported on each real server. The basic topology that needs to be used for now with this is the following scheme: 1 primary LVS routing box (set up to masquerade) with 2 ethernet devices, one to the "real world" and one to a private network. (a second LVS router to be used as a hot-standby/failover machine is supported) This is the machine that will have the floating real world IP(s) for services to be load balanced (ie www.foo.bar). It also has a floating private IP used on the back side that is the default gateway for the real servers. On the private network, all the "real" servers are set up to serve web or ftp requests and are able to masquerade through the LVS machine. This stuff must be set up independent of the piranha stuff and piranha will expect you to tell it about the configuration (network mostly) of these machines. The gui tool (piranha) is more for looks right now. It is sort of bound to the backend bits, but is lacking a lot of glue. :) It also has trouble editing the config file (ie it corrupts it pretty regularly). I'm mostly interested in UI feedback on it. I realize these docs are sparse and probably quite difficult to follow. I'll write better ones RSN. I'm really interested in hearing what is really broken with these things. There are man pages for all the pieces (except for piranha). nanny.8 is still "under development" so you'll have to wait for the rest of it. I'll try to push out updated bits tomorrow afternoon. Thanks for looking at this stuff. Mike ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Wangsmo Red Hat, Inc "I've seen this before in Montana! Its snowing, nobody lick a flag pole" -- Peggy Hill ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Linux HA Web Site: http://www.henge.com/~alanr/ha/ Linux HA HOWTO: http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/ALPHA/linux-ha/High-Availability-HOWTO.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------