From:	 Alan Robertson <alanr@unix.sh>
To:	 Linux-HA Development List <linux-ha-dev@lists.community.tummy.com>,
	 ha-linux List <linux-ha@muc.de>, Linux Weekly News <lwn@lwn.net>
Subject: Linux-HA February 2002 Status
Date:	 Thu, 21 Feb 2002 16:13:58 -0700

February 2002 Status report for the Linux-HA project.

Alan Robertson attended Linux World Conference and Expo (LWCE) in New York
City,
and gave a technical talk on the Open Cluster Framework, hosted a BOF
on the OCF, participated on a panel, and gave a heartbeat tutorial
at the IBM booth, and came home very tired.

The framework talks were attended by Veritas, Sun, HP and Polyserve
and Mission Critical, and many others.  Audience reaction to the
framework proposal was quite positive.  See opencf.org for more info.

Good conversations were had with various people, and some new developments
in heartbeat and the OCF were planned.  As a result of conversations
at LWCE, A!Press asked Alan to write a book on high-availability
Linux.

After recovering from LWCE, Alan upgraded various machines in his
house/lab to create a reasonable 8-node cluster.

Ram Pai is in the process of developing a cluster membership algorithm
based on the heartbeat API.  It is currently working quite well
on the aforementioned 8-node cluster.

To support Ram's effort, Alan added a few small features useful to API
programs.  As a result of Ram's intensive testing, these features
along with several fixes to them were committed to CVS.

On the Open Cluster Framework front, significant progress was made
on defining the APIs for implementing resource agents.  Enough agreement
was reached that Lars Marowsky-Bree is composing a first draft of the
proposed API.

Conversations were begun on membership APIs, and in particular on
event notification strategies.


	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr@unix.sh