[Pacemaker] Installation woes (w/Debian packages)

[Colin]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 10:07:56AM +0200, Colin wrote:
>> Another question regarding how to activate a pacemaker config: Is
>> there any way to activate the config before the cluster starts up?
>>
>> (Scenario is that the installation of the cluster nodes is fully
>> automatic. It seems a bit awkward how to configure pacemaker if I
>> can't just write out a config file during install: I need to somehow
>> make sure that on first system boot a script that activates my config
>> is executed, but not too early because it takes a minute or so until
>> cibadmin(1) and friends actually work...)
>
> I believe you can drop a cib.xml into place before the cluster first starts
> and it'll pick up and run with that.  I'm not a fan of that method, though,
> as it has all the same problems as imaging machines (no easy means of
> updating running configs the same way as you update "initial" configs, and
> so on).  We're configuring pacemaker using Puppet, just describing the
> primitives, groups, constraints and so on in the manifest and having Puppet
> do all the heavy lifting if required.

Thanks for the note, plus: I've never heard of Puppet, but will check it out.

(1 min later: http://wiki.github.com/camptocamp/puppet-pacemaker has
no downloads, and no documentation; is it even remotely stable/ready
for use?)

> Why do you need to have the config setup completely before starting
> the cluster, though?

Let's just say I like my programs/daemons to start up with the correct
configuration, because I've already been burnt: Some time back there
was a similar problem with a different application where the default
that it started up with just didn't work correctly; it's always easier
when a program/daemon just reads a config file, and monitors it for
changes (or re-reads it on HUP), these application-specific ways of
feeding a config into an already running program are particular
annoying because every program uses a different method for it.

Is there a simple-and-clean alternative to dropping a cib.xml file
into place when doing a fully-automated installation?

Regards, Colin