[DRBD-user] Fw: Where is How to DRBDB ?

Diego Julian Remolina dijuremo at ibb.gatech.edu
Fri Aug 5 14:40:58 CEST 2005

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


On Friday 05 August 2005 07:58, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> now I found time to sort of review it.
> it seems to be somewhat redhat specific, so some steps may not be
> neccessary (rc.modules) or slightly different on other distributions.
> the EXIT_ZOMBIE patch should no longer be neccessary.

It is 100% RHEL4 specific...
I was running 0.7.10 and went to update to 0.7.11, the make rpm fails 
complaining about the TASK_ZOMBIE, so i had to modify it to EXIT_ZOMBIE. and 
after that change, the rpm was succesfully built.  I tthink that RedHat 
applied changes to their kernel so that their 2.6.9-11 kernel uses 
EXIT_ZOMBIE and not TASK_ZOMBIE and for that reason the condition does not 
work.  I did not see any version newer than 0.7.11 on the download site and I 
assume you do not change the tar releases withouth increasing the release 
number, so I assume the problem is still present on RHEL4 machines.

>
> a separate partition for the meta data is nice, but it should preferably
> be located on a separate spindle... (think seek time for meta data
> updates). so sdbX if your storage is on sda.
> with LVM and a number of pvs, you can specify an explicit pv on lvcreate.
> this is of course not neccessary, but may improve performance.
>

This is running on one ARECA ARC-1160 SATA raid controller with 15HDD
HDD0 and HDD1 are mirrored for the OS.
HDD2 - HDD13 are 12 HDD in raid 10 where the drbd devices are located.
HDD14 is a hot spare.

If I put the metadata in the mirror of HDD0 and HDD1, I risk forgetting about 
the metadata, reinstalling the machine and screwing the drbd states.  I know 
this could be recreated but, I prefer to have it all in the big raid 
partition which should not get reformatted in case of an OS crash.

> suprisingly, it is not neccessary that the device minor numbers and the
> order of resources in the config file match. that is why there is an
> explicit "device" line in the disk section of the resources.
> but to avoid confusion, one should probably not "randomize" these things.
>
> there are precompiled heartbeat and drbd packages, so you don't
> neccessarily need to bother with compilation and dependency problems
> yourself.
>

Those are the ones I used to pretty much get my setup up and running.  But 
some persons need a step by step which is pretty much how I wrote the 
howto... :).
I did not see any recommendations or procedures about updating, those may be 
useful to persons that are just starting with drbd.  I hesitated a while when 
RHEL4 update 1 came out, because I wanted to do the RH update and the drbd 
from 0.7.10 to 0.7.11 and was not able to find any info on how safe it was to 
go from 0.7.10 to 0.7.11, or if there were any precautions.  Could I run 
0.7.10 on primary and 0.7.11 on secondary for a while after the secondary was 
updated, etc.

> the interessting Howto links are
> http://www.linux-ha.org/DRBD
> http://www.linux-ha.org/QuickStart07
> http://www.linux-ha.org/GettingStarted

Thanks for taking the time to read through the howtos. I know not everyone 
uses RH, but if some one is, then that should help them a lot.

Diego



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