Month: February 2002

Linux HA clustering, mutt with LDAP, and workstation upgrades

Last few days I have spent installing a HA (High-availability) cluster. I needed an active/active setup for two nodes to run Apache and PostgreSQL services. Both nodes are connected to external shared storage. It took me some time to get the concepts (especially with quorum partitions and raw devices), but afterwards, installation was a bliss ;). I have used KimberLite clustering technology, which is open source and free. There is also a commercial solution on the site, for those who want. SourceForge.NET Clustering Foundry was also very helpful in getting the whole thing.

Meanwhile, I managed to configure my mutt to work with MS Exchange address book over LDAP. mutt-ldap-search.

I’ve also had my workstation upgraded in certain ways :) More memory, less CPU, better graphics card (GeForce 2 MX 32MB 200 Series this time). Strangely, I cannot get more then 40FPS in Quake3 using original Nvidia drivers.

Now Last of all the news is that I am now testing init script for NovaNet services. Since Novastor didn’t provide with anything automatic to stop the service and remove all kinds of shared memory segments and semaphores, I had to write my own. It will be available for public, when initial testing is over ;) .

Kickstart

Recently I was playing with KickStart – this piece of software helps you in case you need to do plenty identical installations. ksconfig is a new configuraiton tool, which helps you to create installation config file, which can later be put on the floppy for UNinteractive installation :). I used it for cluster setup where nodes are pretty much the same with all the difference set in the DHCP server.

CVS and bugtracking with Mantis

All the small things to close working week. Rest of the day I’ve spent education myself on CVS again. :) I’ve came across CVS book at red-bean.com which I now want to order hardcopy. All my today CVS practise was around a wonderful piece of software called Mantis. It is simple yet powerfull bugtracking system, which I have adopted as technical support tool for our company. All of my changes were based on version 0.16.0, while mantis went to version 0.17.0. So, I’ve been porting all my changes to the new version. Tried both ways with traditional diff-edit-patch-repeat and cvs ways. So far, I enjoy the cvs way of doing things, and I haven’t yet tried branching and merging. Oh, I sound like a developer, don’t I? :)