Getting Started with Heartbeat

Now that your cluster is all configured, start it with:

/etc/init.d/heartbeat start

Things might work perfectly or not at all. Fortunately, with logging enabled, troubleshooting is easy, because Heartbeat outputs informative log messages. Heartbeat even will let you know when a previous log message is not something you have to worry about. When bringing a new cluster on-line, I usually open an SSH terminal to each cluster member and tail the messages file like so:

tail -f /var/log/messages

Then, in separate terminals, I start up Heartbeat. If there are any problems, it is usually pretty easy to spot them.

Heartbeat also comes with very good documentation. Whenever I run into problems, this documentation has been invaluable. On my system, it is located under the /usr/share/doc/ directory.

I've barely scratched the surface of Heartbeat's capabilities here. Fortunately, a lot of resources exist to help you learn about Heartbeat's more-advanced features. These include active/passive and active/active clusters with N number of nodes, DRBD, the Cluster Resource Manager and more. Now that your feet are wet, hopefully you won't be quite as intimidated as I was when I first started learning about Heartbeat. Be careful though, or you might end up like me and want to cluster everything.