[DRBD-user] URGENT Request for DRBD Developers

Art Age Software artagesw at gmail.com
Fri May 23 19:26:57 CEST 2008

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


I am in a bit of a quandary. We are running production systems on
RHEL-5 with the DRBD 8.0.11 build from the CentOS Extras repository.
We urgently need to update to 8.0.12 due to the critical bug in dopd
in 8.0.11 that essentially breaks the high availability failover
feature of a heartbeat/drbd combination.

However, the CentOS maintainer of the DRBD package has stopped
supporting the 8.0.x branch and has moved to supporting only the 8.2.x
branch. We cannot upgrade to 8.2.x. The spirit of RHEL/CentOS releases is
**stability first.** Bug fixes and security fixes are backported and
bleeding edge new features are shunned. This is why we choose to run
RHEL/CentOS on our production servers. If we wanted bleeding edge, we
would run Fedora + DRBD 8.2.x.

This is not to knock the 8.2.x branch. I'm glad that you continue to
push new features and functionality into DRBD. But you clearly
understand the need for a more mature stable branch for your
production users, or you would not maintain multiple branches of your
product.

According the the CentOS maintainer, switching to 8.2.x was "the
recommendation from the drbd developers, and we are taking their
advice." He refers to this thread:

http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?group=gmane.linux.network.drbd&article=14090

IMHO, the CentOSPlus repository would be an appropriate place for the
DRBD 8.2.x branch. CentOSExtras should continue to support the 8.0.x
branch as the current "stable" branch. It should never have been
suggested that 8.0.x be replaced by 8.2.x.

The removal of support of the 8.0.x branch in CentOS Extras is a major
break in the the RHEL/CentOS release policy and it completely breaks
anyone in our situation. The package management "rug" has been pulled
out from under us. This is critically important, especially with a
product like DRBD that has many intricate components and requires
mating to the current kernel version. This is **not** something that
we want to build ourselves.

I respectfully ask that you add your comments to this bug report, and
let the CentOS DRBD maintainer know that continuing support for the
current stable branch of DRBD is critical for your current production
users of that branch. The bug URL is:

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=2795

Sincerely,

Sam W.



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