Chris O'Regan wrote:
Hi,
I am building a pair of provisioning servers and I need a hand with some of the details regarding setting things up.
The pair of servers is intended for fault tolerance. I want to ensure that I always have at least one provisioning server available, especially if I need to rebuild or upgrade one of the provisioning servers! :-)
We have a Netapp that I would like to use for sharing the data between the two servers, however I have just noticed this warning in the wiki page titled "Relocating Your Install":
"ALSO NOTE: /var/lib/cobbler can not live on NFS, as this interferes with locking ("flock") cobbler does around it's storage files."
Yes, this is powered by flock() which is nice in that (A) it's simple, and (B) doesn't do scary things if Cobbler gets Ctrl-C'd and so forth.
flock does not work over NFS, though you can edit the serializer code to set LOCKING_ENABLED = False in extraordinary circumstances (and at your own risk).
I actually have everything on the filer on my development server and I have not encountered any problems. If this just means that only one of my servers can write out the configuration files then that is a sufficient compromise. Note that I don't think I will be using the web interface for managing the cobbler configuration, configuration changes aren't likely to happen very often, and I will probably be the only person making changes. I suspect that locking issues aren't going to be too big of a deal.
The web server will be chrooted. I don't think this will be a problem since, if I understand correctly, it will contact cobblerd via XMLRPC. I am considering putting cobblerd into the chroot as well. Are there any issues running cobbler/cobblerd as a non-root user?
Anything else that I am missing?
If I was maintaining a disaster recovery setup, I'd just use "cobbler replicate" between the two servers on cron, or if they are supposed to always be in sync (and cron is unacceptable) and there isn't a reliable concept of a master, possibly set up cobbler triggers to rsync /var/lib/cobbler/config to the other server whenever something changes on one of them.
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