[xcat-user] Upgrade template overwrite + HA[Scanned]

[Arif Ali]

Hi,

1)
is it normal for xcat to overwrite the compute.pkglist, compute.exlist, 
compute.tmpl after upgrading xCAT? if that is the case, what is the best 
way to backup xcat configs. I remember from our CSM days we used to use 
csmbackup, which copyied the personalised templates, which we could have 
restored very easily

2)
How far away are we in getting the HA working for xCAT, as we have a few 
projects which will require this that are coming up.

In a current customer site I have set the 2nd node as a service node 
with everything ticked in the servicenode table, which also happily does 
torque and moab HA. The only thing I am missing now are the tables to 
failover.

I have a thought about this a bit, and tought about a few things. have a 
cron job to

* rsync /install every week/day
* backup xcat database every week/day

Then use linux-ha to do the fail-over/fail-back, which can cover for the 
differences between xCAT and xCATsn RPM, and restoreDB to restore the 
database on the secondary/primary node

The other option is to use is MySQL replication, which I have been 
reading about today. This works in a master/slaves configuration, where 
the master says, here is my data, and the slave picks up what it wants. 
This is all mentioned in ch 16 of the mysql 5.0 reference manual. But 
obviously it needs to be easily configurable for the end user, so a 
certain amount of coding will be required here. We will probably need 
linux-ha here so that we can promote the slave to master, if the master 
goes down.

I would love some input here, unless if anyone else has any better 
suggestions or if this is already completed

regards,

-- 
Arif Ali MBCS
HPC Software Engineer
OCF plc

Support Phone:   +44 (0)845 702 3829
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