Building a Two-Node Linux Cluster with Heartbeat

Both node1 and node2 must have Linux installed. I chose Red Hat and installed Red Hat 7.2 on node1 and Red Hat 6.2 on node2 (I simply wanted to find out if we could build a cluster with different versions of Linux installed on different nodes). Make sure you have installed all dæmons that you want to support. Here is my installation detail:

Hard disk partitions: 128MB for swap and the rest mounted for "/" (so that you don't need to worry about whether there is too much or not enough for a certain subdirectory).

Installed Packages:

Heartbeat is a part of Ultra Monkey (The Linux HA Project), and the RPM can be downloaded from www.UltraMonkey.org.

The download is small and RPM installation is smooth and simple. However, the document or HOWTO for configuration is hard to find and confusing. In fact, that is the reason I decided to write this HOWTO; so that hopefully you can get your cluster setup with less problems.

It is not the purpose of this article to show you how to install Red Hat; a lot of excellent documentation can be found at either www.linuxdoc.org or www.redhat.com. I will simply include some of the most important configuration files for your reference:

/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       localhost
192.168.1.1     router
192.168.1.2     node1
192.168.1.3     node2

This file should be the same on both node1 and node2; you may add any other nodes as you see fit.

Check HOSTNAME (cat /etc/HOSTNAME) and make sure it returns either node1 or node2. If not, you can use this command (uname -n > /etc/HOSTNAME) to fix the hostname problem.

ifconfig for node1

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:97:9C:52:28  
          inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:18617 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:14682 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:3 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x6800 
eth0:0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:97:9C:52:28  
          inet addr:192.168.1.4  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x6800 
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:3924  Metric:1
          RX packets:38 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:38 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

Please notice that eth0:0 shows the IP aliasing with IP 192.168.1.4.

ifconfig for node2

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:08:26:B2:A4  
          inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:15673 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:17550 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:2 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x6700 
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:3924  Metric:1
          RX packets:142 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:142 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 

If you are using Internet Explorer on Windows, you might have problems accessing FTP (Netscape works much better). I suggest you either use a command-line FTP or an FTP Windows/X Window System client (e.g., wu_ftp) to access the FTP site of Ultra Monkey (ftp.UltraMonkey.org).

Once you log in to the FTP server of Ultra Monkey, go to pub, then UltraMonkey and then the latest version 1.0.2 (not the beta). The only package is heartbeat-0.4.9-1.um.1.i386.rpm; save heartbeat-0.4.9-1.um.1.i386.rpm on your Linux box, log in as root and install it with

rpm -ivh heartbeat-0.4.9-1.um.1.i386.rpm