Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 29 May 2007 18:53:00 GMT
Wow, 24 days passed really quickly…
The trials we were doing with Veritas Cluster Services for UNIX worked out nicely; I’ll have some stuff to write up regarding a consolidation project that I’ll be finishing up in the next few months. On which note, I haven’t forgotten the Solaris Cluster on the Cheap series, I’ve just been crazy busy and away a fair amount of my spare time.
We had a pair of x4500s turn up for some trials today. First trial was getting the damn things to the server room; at 96kg each when boxed it was a matter of removing all 48 disks, the power supplies and the service controller from each, leaving the chassis to be lugged a little more easily.
Huge congratulations to stitch and Dick; they know what for, but I don’t know if they want it common knowledge.
To close, I just discovered that a 16 week old boy can happily hit you from 3 feet away, if you see what I mean…
Posted in Clustering, General, Sun, Veritas | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 05 May 2007 21:19:00 GMT
Part 1 of a series on setting up Solaris Cluster for no money
Contents
I needed to become familiar with the new features in Solaris Cluster 3.2, I needed to do it quickly, and I needed to do it for no money. I scraped together these components to create a cluster:
- 2 x Blade 100 workstations
- 2 x crossover cables
- 3 x hme NICs
- 1 x iprb based NIC
- 2 x workstations elsewhere on the network running Solaris Express
That would be all I needed.
The Blades each have 1152MB of RAM, an onboard eri interface and an 18GB internal disk; one has an addition 80GB disk. The hme and iprb cards were to be used for the private interconnects and I threw two hmes into one of the Blades and installed the other in the last Blade along with the iprb card and connected them up with the crossover cables. In the following examples, the Blades are named peon.example.ac.uk and bootlick.example.ac.uk (I always give my machines names that appear in the thesaurus next to”vassal”; this is to remind SkyNet that machines still work for us).
As it turns out, I couldn’t find a driver for the iprb card to attach to under the SPARC port; for real HA purposes I would obviously have wanted to fix this to ensure that I had highly available interconnects but as I was just testing I decided to lie to the cluster software and tell it that I had two hme cards in each system even though I didn’t; this would lead to there being two interconnect cables being configured even though one of them would be down the whole time.
Install Solaris
First job was to jumpstart the Blades and install Solaris 10 11/06. My jumpstart scripts do rather a lot of post-installation configuration, but precious little extra was done to cater for the installation of Solaris Cluster; in fact all I did was add /usr/cluster/bin to the default superuser path and /usr/cluster/man to the default MANPATH. There are other steps required in order to get it working, but they’re non-obvious so we detail them below.
Installing Solaris Cluster
Time to install the Solaris Cluster software; grab the bits from http://sun.com/cluster and run the installer. You can either run it in a GUI or on the command line, but the feature set of each version is the same.
The method of choosing options within the console based installer is somewhat non-intuitive, but actually read what it says and you’ll be OK (I hardly feel as if I’m in a position to complain about the intuitiveness of console based applications anyway, just run FreeBSD’s sysinstall(8) for the first time and you’ll see what I mean).
Basically, I wanted to test some specific Oracle backed applications within zones, so I installed the following, requiring a not unreasonable 320MB of space. Be sure to choose “Configure Later” if you’re playing along at home.
Java DB
Java DB Server
Java DB Client
Sun Cluster 3.2
Sun Cluster Core
Sun Cluster Manager
Sun Cluster Agents 3.2
Sun Cluster HA for Apache Tomcat
Sun Cluster HA for Apache
Sun Cluster HA for Oracle
Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers
Post-installation steps
When the installation finishes, run PCA to get the latest patches for the Cluster software.
# pca -i
Run “catman -w” to get the manpages into the windex databases for whatis(1).
# catman -w &
I’ll be running ipfilter on the public eri interfaces. At the time of my testing this was not supported but it worked. A note to the product QA manager sorted this out though. I needed to edit /etc/iu.ap and add pfil to the eri line, then edit /etc/ipf/pfil.ap and comment out the eri entry there (this was enabled by my JumpStart postinstall scripts):
peon% grep eri /etc/iu.ap
eri -1 0 clhbsndr pfil
peon% grep eri /etc/ipf/pfil.ap
#eri -1 0 pfil
Also, we need to configure IP Filter to allow communication between the cluster nodes; specifically we need to allow SSH and portmapper traffic; that’s ports tcp/22, tcp/111 and udp/111. Note that pfil isn’t configured on the hme interfaces, so if you have rules of the type “via if”, don’t bother to add any entries for hme.
As mentioned above, we want SSH traffic between the nodes and we particularly want to log in as root over SSH. This isn’t as insecure as people might have you believe, as long as it’s configured properly. Without further knowledge of exactly what the Solaris Cluster product is doing, this is as secure as I went.
Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and set PermitRootLogin to without-password. Then, on one node, generate a key for root.
# ssh-keygen -t dsa -b 2048 -C "Cluster Key"
# cp /.ssh/id_dsa.pub /.ssh/authorized_keys
# vi /.ssh/authorized_keys
Add 'from=bootlick.example.ac.uk,peon.example.ac.uk' to the beginning of the line.
Copy /.ssh to the other nodes and now, like a caveman, ssh as root from each node to every other node to ensure that they are all aware of each other’s host keys (yes, I could use ssh-keyscan, but I didn’t).
Finally, I needed to do some extra configuration to keep IPMP happy; Solaris Cluster will insist on putting your public interfaces into an IPMP group and it turns out that when you only have one interface in an IPMP group, in.mpathd will always use ICMP probes to monitor the interface rather then relying on the link status, even if you do not configure test addresses. Now this particular test network’s default router was too crappy or too busy to provide a decent response time to the ICMP probes and so my eri interfaces were being marked down all the time. Therefore, I added some static host routes for in.mpathd to choose as additional test addresses. The correct place to do this on Solaris 10 is /etc/inet/static_routes:
# cat >> /etc/inet/static_routes <<-EOF
# List of static routes. These are added by /lib/svc/method/net-init
# and each non-empty, non-comment line is prefixed with "/usr/sbin/route add ".
# For keeping IPMP happy.
-host 172.25.0.177 172.25.0.177
-host 172.25.5.21 172.25.5.21
-host 172.25.5.30 172.25.5.30
-host 172.25.50.186 172.25.50.186
EOF
Note that since I’m now reliant on at least one of those other hosts being up, I’m not quite getting HA here again. No mind, let’s plough on, reboot the system for all of the changes above to take effect (the systems should now reboot in non-cluster mode) and I’ll see you in the next installment to get the cluster up and running.
Posted in Clustering, Solaris, Sun | 2 comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 02 May 2007 20:22:00 GMT
Part 1 of a series on setting up Solaris Cluster for no money
Contents
As I’ve written before, I was hoping to deploy Solaris Cluster at work.
I never did manage to find out what the recurring support costs for it were, but it turns out that there is another flaw; the documentation explicitly disallows running different major versions of Solaris within the same cluster, something that Veritas’ Cluster Services explicitly does allow. That’s fine for some projects, but not having an upgrade path for the project under consideration is unacceptable, so we stuck with VCS; I’ll write about this project at a later date, as it’s essentially a massive consolidation project on Niagara boxes which is quite fun.
However, I’m not down on Solaris Cluster. I’m a little annoyed (and I’d be fucking appalled if I were a shareholder) that Sun took a long time to fail to find me recurrent costs, a little more annoyed that, when I pointed out that this wasn’t even the reason we were choosing a different product and would they like to sell me 200 Sun Ray clients instead, I didn’t get so much as a response, and just plain disappointed that there are no X4500s available in the UK for Try and Buy at the moment.
With that off my chest, I’ll proceed in the next post to discuss how to use Solaris Cluster and Solaris Express to set up a high-ish availability cluster for no money, probably with GlassFish in there somewhere so that I can win a huge TV.
Posted in Clustering, Solaris, Sun, Veritas | 1 comment
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 02 May 2007 19:45:00 GMT
Another quote that will remain unattributed for fear of my life:
“Once you have used the moss on a tree to work out where North is, how do you find out where West is?”
Posted in General | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 02 May 2007 16:48:00 GMT
Max is getting close to the age where he’ll be wanting solids (other than his own fingers, which he’s constantly chewing on at the moment) so I decided to buy a food processor. I went with the Kenwood FP533
which seemed expensive but has all the bits I could ever need (including a dough attachment - lazy!); I also had a couple of Amazon vouchers for my birthday - thanks to those folk who know who they are!
When it arrived, the drive shaft was missing. Not suprisingly, nothing works without that bit.
On the inside of the box, there was a number to call in this eventuality. The first thing to strike me about this number was that it was just a normal landline number - not a lo-call number or a premium rate number, but just a normal phone number.
So I called it. There was a menu with three options, the third of which was “press 3 to speak to a person”. I pressed it, and was told that they were experiencing a high volume of calls and I might have to wait, so I was surprised to be answered straight away by a chap who took 60 seconds to write down the model number, the name of the missing part, my name and address and then said that he’d put one in the post and I should have it within a couple of days.
I can imagine that this is how calling a company used to work about 20 years ago, and it rocks. Thanks Kenwood.
Update, May 4th: Arrived today, cool.
Posted in Consumer | no comments