Cluster project

[Caleb clark]

Hi guys,

I have been using Monit on all my linux/aix/solaris servers for several
months now. Great software! Thanks again for your guys work on this!

Anyway, I have been thinking of building a cluster, since i have
several several linux systems providing services such as, bind,
sendmail, MySQL, radius, squid ... etc. I also have a SAN which all of
my servers are booting from and running on the SAN. This makes shared
data storage very easy for me.

I searched and searched clustering sofware and did not find anything
that would do what i wanted it to do.
I dont want to fail over based on a UDP hearbeat, or serial heartbeat.
My main concern is not that the hardware will fail, but some component
of the software will. So i want to fail over based on a service, not
hardware.

So i turned to Monit to do the logic for me. Works great for a one way
failover. (need the "up" event feature to go bidirectional). The only
other software i am using is fake, to handle the IP address take over.
Which is bassicly a set of bash scripts that wrap around send_arp, which
bassicly spoofs an arp on a host. Im working on something that will keep
track of all the arp's on a segment, and have send_arp blast all of
those when its time to fail over.

What I am getting to is, that you guys are VERY close to having a
really cool cluster project here. Have you guys put any thought into
that? With m/monit and monit together, thats the perfect solution for
what I am trying to do. Control a 2 node (or more!) cluster via secure
web services. Only thing really missing is the arp spoof for IP address
take over.

I would be more than happy to (attempt) to write some code for this (I
will end up doing it anyway) if you guys would be interested in this at
all. Though im a perl programmer, very little C. But i have access to
some decent C programmers here.

Thoughts?

-caleb

-Caleb Clark
-Network Analyst
-County of Mendocino
-Information Services