[Sh-X] Fw: Shaman-X progress report on 13 Nov 2003

[Dominique Chabord]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dominique Chabord"
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 12:58 PM
Subject: Shaman-X progress report on 13 Nov 2003


> Hello everybody,
>
> Bonjour à tous,
>
> Here is some news about the project.
>
>
> 1) Technical : WDX now runs OK on MacOS X !
> David made some changes in the way the heartbeat meassage is formatted to
> make it more robust and independent from processor's convention regarding
> byte addressing. David said this version should also comply with various
64
> bit architectures too ! I compiled it on MacOS-X 10.1.3 and passed some
> tests, interoperating with a Debian Woody. I could not find any default
> during my tests.
> WDX V0-4-2 is therefore the first high availability solution for MacOS-X.
> I updated the wdx-macosx document available on the web site.
>
> 2) Technical : DDX preliminary architecture.
> Remainder :  DDX stands for DummyDoctor-DDX. It is a test bed, training
> workshop, mission configuration validation tool etc.. A virtual machine is
a
> programme which simulates a CPU and its standard resources.
> The end of October was dedicated to seting up and tuning a demo of a DDX
> environmennt by simulating a whole set of virtual computers. WDX groups
> were defined to include a mix of virtual and physical computers.
> In this demo, we used V2.2 Linux kernel which does not support IP
aliassing,
> so we had to patch base interface addresses in the script files to emulate
> IP floatting address. Because Bochs does not managed disk
> images upon "mount/umount" commands, we had to use the floppy
> instead to reproduce a shared disk bahavior.
>
> 3) Technical : wdx-recovery-kits (WRK)
> Scripts developed for implementing failovers are now stagged on the
website
> in the directory:
> http://downloads.shaman-x.org/wdx-recovery-kits
> This directory will receive a library of all examples of failover scripts
> for different applications. Users will be invited to reuse and improve
these
> scripts as they build their own solutions. I posted first the scripts used
> for the demo.
>
> 4) Development : CVS repository is now set up on Savannah
> Thanks to Laurent, Shaman-X CVS repository is now set up.
> Remainder: CVS stands for something like concurrent versioning system. It
> allows several developers to work in parallel on the source code and
> integrate their results consistently.
> For people involved in development, please contact Laurent.
> wdx-0.4.2 is the stable version for Linux, OpenBSD and MacOS-X
> wdx-0.5 will be the next unstable version if we require it.
>
> 5) Events : October 31st and November 1st: Free Software Days at Lyon
> Shaman-X project was kindly invited to participate to Free Software Days
> event organized at Lyon, hosted by the Savoie-Aravis
> Linux User Group and showed a demonstration of WDX, running
> over a 9 node cluster, including Linux and OpenBSD.
> We made about 20-30 in depth presentations of the demo. People showed a
> strong interest in both Shaman-X concepts and WDX outstanding
capabilities.
> Both specialists and newbies enjoyed the messages and encouraged us.
> Several people proposed some help in different areas of expertise.
> A large account contacted us too on the booth, regarding high-availability
> and disaster tolerance expertise.
>
> 6) Events : presentation at Lyon Business School
> Shaman-X project has been presented at Lyon Business School called Ecole
de
> Management. About 30 post-graduate students attended this session and
> discovered free-software concepts. Unfortunatly, Shaman-X appeared as a
very
> complex business case, mixing innovation, technical and business aspects,
> and most motivated students did not dare basing their cursus in this
> subject.
> Thank you to Pascal Bourgier from Thesame who was very instrumental to
make
> this presentation happen.
>
> 7) Announcement: WDX 0.4.2 was announced in Freshmeat letter date 12
> November
> Focus was put on new MacOS-X support:
> <<<
> [097] - WDX 0.4.2
>   by Bounaberdi (http://freshmeat.net/users/Bounaberdi/)
>   Wednesday, November 12th 2003 08:26
>
> System :: Clustering/Distributed Networks
> System :: Recovery Tools
> System :: Systems Administration
>
> About: WDX is dedicated communication software for use  between
> multi-vendor computers. It detects network  failures and computer
> failures. It automates application  failover for over 2 to 16 networked
> computer groups. It  interoperates over Linux, Unix, NT, and VMS
> platforms,  with simple nodes or clustered ones.
>
> Changes: WDX now provides high availability for Mac OS X. It is intended
> to be used, in particular, in the following situations: automated failover
> between up to 16 Apple servers (Xserves), sharing data in Fibre Channel
> loop or fabric topology (Xserve-RAIDs) and IP-floating; end-to-end network
> redundancy and subnet failover for network attached storage (NAS); any
> kind of "Do-it-yourself" high-availability cluster for the usual purposes.
> WDX interoperates between Linux, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X to support Shaman-X
> project objectives.
>
> License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
>
> URL: http://freshmeat.net/projects/wdx/
> >>>
>
> 8) Coming Events : February 3rd to 5fith, Solutions-Linux-2004 in Paris
> Shaman-X is now looking for a partner who would host WDX demo on their
booth
> at the exhibition for the three days.
> http://www.solutionslinux.fr/en/index.php (bi-lingual)
> We have identified three areas in which de very demonstrative solution
could
> be set for a reasonable amount of work:
> - wdx web based data center administration interface (aka HDX)
> - Disaster recovery based on two simulated data centers: show how to
> differentiate local and remote failover
> - Data replication management, based either on DRBD (replication of block
> device) or MySQL (Database replication)
> A specification document of the demo will be issued soon. We consider
about
> reconducting the choice for BOCHS simulation.
>
> 9) New projects:
> - Three MacOS-X servers for encoding and streaming over fibre channel
> topology: University of Luik, Belgium
> - A linux failover solution in Brussels, Belgium
>
> 10) Shaman-X mailing list
> For those of you who are not connected yet, please register to Shaman-X
> public mailing list. You will find the registration form by following
> the pointer on www.shaman-x.org overview page.
>
> 11) On-going works:
> - Delivery kits: (deb, rpm, ports, disk.img...)
> - WDX demo specification
> - DRBD evaluation
> - A MySQL-HA project has been identified which has the knowledge about
MySQL
> replication management procedures
> - Evaluation of WindowsXP version of wdx and development environments
> alternatives.
> - Evaluation of LVS+WDX combination.
>
> As you can see, Shaman-X is a fast pacing project. Technical uniqueness is
> now well established and I'm convinced that our efforts will be rewarded
> shortly.
>
> This is all for today,
> Thank you for everybody's contribution,
> ciao,
> Dominique
> http://www.shaman-x.org
>