reboot vs. uname -S / hostname <hostname> and more

[Gordon Morrison]

In Unixland, most things can be overcome without a reboot, but sometimes a reboot is quicker.
:o/
(Too bad you can't reboot your managers:o)

Using the name of the service will work for telnet, as long as the service is associated with an IP address, even if that address "floats" between various servers (as long as your network is set up to allow it). Just make sure that the service name is defined in /etc/hosts on all relevant servers and in DNS, and make *VERY* sure that only one server is actively hosting that address at any one time.

[Emiel van Grinsven_1]

yeah, that's another issue we have to overcome.
What if the original node will come up again?
We thought about it and since it's a manual action it can be halted or booted without networking but still.. you know that this always happens when some new guy has standby etcetera..

the network is not an issue.

in 2 weeks we have to test this whole procedure. I think we already overcome most of the potentional problems.
Thanks for the help!

Emiel

[Gordon Morrison]

Hi Emiel,
Again, we're re-inventing the wheel here. This is more or less how Serviceguard does it:

The "spare" lan card (i.e. the one that is used for the failover service) is NOT configured automatically, so if a machine reboots, that card will have no address. The card should be configured & activated in the startup script for the service, which also does NOT start automatically. It would also be a good idea to put a simple test in the startup script to see if the service is already running, say, try to ping it & if you get a response, abort the startup.
Of course, this means that every time the service fails, it will need to be restarted manually, but that's so much better than suddenly having 2 machines with the same address on the same network!

Of course, Serviceguard would do all this automatically & seamlessly in a couple of minutes, but then you already know that.

p.s. Having re-read this thread, I see you have 2 EMC's in dual sites. So I presume you also have 2 Superdomes in dual sites? (and probably 2 managers...)
And still no budget for software. I sympathise. I really do.

[Travis Harp_1]

A couple things here...
First, man this is a scary option but you know that already. 8)
Second, you could turn off autoboot on the systems so that it will sit at the BCH (the boot prompt) waiting to be told what to do.
That way if the primary drops and tries to reboot, it will only make it to the BCH and sit there. If you have the LAN/Web console configured, it would be a simple and remote process to boot it up the rest of the way.