Installing Heartbeat

Start YaST and select Miscellaneous+High Availability or enter yast2 heartbeat to start the YaST Heartbeat module. It lets you create a new cluster or add new nodes to an existing cluster.

On the Node Configuration screen, add a node to the cluster by specifying the node name of the node you want to add, then click Add. Repeat this process for each node you want to add to the cluster, then click Next.

Figure 2.1. Node Configuration

You can find node names for servers by entering uname -n on each node.

The installation program will not let you add this node, because the node name of this server is already automatically added to the cluster.

If after adding a node to the cluster, you need to specify a different node name for that node, double-click the node you want to edit, change the node name, then click Edit.

On the Authentication Keys screen, specify the authentication method the cluster will use for communication between cluster nodes, and if necessary an Authentication Key (password). Then click Next.

Figure 2.2. Authentication Keys

Both the MD5 and SHA1 methods require a shared secret, which is used to protect and authenticate messages. The CRC method does not perform message authentication, and only protects against corruption, not against attacks.

The SHA1 method is recommended, because it provides the strongest authentication scheme available. The authentication key (password) you specify will be used on all nodes in the cluster.

When running this installation program on the other cluster nodes, you should choose the same authentication method for all nodes.

On the Media Configuration screen, specify the method Heartbeat will use for internal communication between cluster nodes. This configuration is written to /etc/ha.d/ha.cf.

Figure 2.3. Media Configuration

This provides a way for cluster nodes to signal that they are alive to other nodes in the cluster. For proper redundancy, you should specify at least two Heartbeat media if possible. Choose at least one Heartbeat medium, and if possible, more than one:

UDP Port sets the UDP port that is used for the broadcast media. Leave this set to the default value (694) unless you are running multiple Heartbeat clusters on the same network segment, in which case you need to run each cluster on a different port number.

	UDP Port Settings
Note that the UDP port setting only apply to broadcast media, not to the other media you may use. When editing UDP ports manually in /etc/ha.d/ha.cf, the udpport entry must precede the bcast entry it belongs to, otherwise Heartbeat will ignore the port setting.

After specifying a Heartbeat medium, click Add to add that medium type to Heartbeat and proceed with Next.

On the Start-up Configuration screen, choose whether you want to start the Heartbeat software on this cluster server each time it is booted.

Figure 2.4. Startup Configuration

If you select Off, you must start Heartbeat manually each time this cluster server is booted. You can start the Heartbeat server manually using the rcheartbeat start command.

To start the Heartbeat server immediately, select On - Start Heartbeat Server Now and when Booting.

To start Heartbeat on the other servers in the cluster when they are booted, enter chkconfig heartbeat on at the server console of each of those servers. You can also enter chkconfig heartbeat off at the server console to have Heartbeat not start automatically when the server is rebooted.

To configure Heartbeat on the other nodes in the cluster run /usr/lib/heartbeat/ha_propagate on the heartbeat node you just configured. On 64-bit systems, the command ha_propagate is located below /usr/lib64/heartbeat/.

This will copy the Heartbeat configuration to the other nodes in the cluster. You will be prompted to enter the root user password for each cluster node.

Run rcheartbeat start to start heartbeat on each of the nodes where the configuration has been copied.