TITLE: Version Change Summary
AUTHOR: Simon Edwards
UPDATED: 20051206
README for release 1.0.4

!! THIS IS COMPLEX SOFTWARE - PLEASE READ DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY !!

This document is just a short README - very detailed documentation is available in the form of a PDF on the project web site. It is strongly recommended that this is read before using this software in production environments. Indeed is it strongly encouraged that the software be configured in a test environment before a production configuration is considered.

Version 1.0.4 is purely a bug-fix release with a few minor improvements over previos 1.0.x releases. A separate 'Release Notes' PDF is available from the web-site with further details of the changes.

Core Features

Linuxha.net has been written to allow system administrators to easily build two node high availability clusters in a very short period of time. Some highlighted features are:

Uses DRBD (bundled as part of the installation) to provide a 'shared-nothing' infrastructure, allowing a cluster to be build using commodity PC hardware - no shared storage is required.
Supports one or more applications running on either or both nodes - total flexibility for the system administrator.
Software / Hardware monitoring - the product includes software and hardware monitoring for support automatic failover due to logical software issues as well as hardware problems.
Networking functionality - all packages can define one or more IP addresses to represent them. An included network monitoring daemon provides IP fail-over to an alternative network card in 0.1 to 0.2 seconds typically.
Speedy configuration - building a cluster is a matter of configuring SSH and creating a simple XML file - the cluster software does the rest! An experiencd administrator can have a bare cluster running in under 5 minutes following software installation!
Dynamic Design - many software features are designed to work dynamically - for example adding, removing and changing the size of file systems for an application can be done whilst that application is running on the cluster.
Arbitary limits - the software does not impose any (practical) limit on the number of applications supported, the number of IP addresses they use or the number of file systems that make use of.
Simply software installation - the software is available in a number of package format and includes no complex dependencies - typically just Perl, XML::Parser (though a kernel sources/development environment is also required for create the bundled Perl modules and kernel module.)

Getting Started

PLEASE VIEW THE AVAILABLE DOCUMENTATION!

The web site provides a series of documents, including guides for installation in general and some particular distributions as well (such as RHEL3,RHEL4 and Fedora Core 3).

Also very installation documents can also be found in the 'doc' directory that the product installs.

Software

The software is available in the following package formats:

[1] Tarp package (generic tar-bundle type install) [2] RPM Package
[3] Autopackage
[4] Slackware Package
[5] TP2 Package

Other formats may be added at later dates.

What Next?

Further minor increments for 1.0.x are likely over the next few months as problems are found and fixed. Minor enhancements may creep in if deemded suitable.

Version 2 is currently in the prototyping stage and wil be radically different - more details soon!

Conact the Author

Linuxha is written and maintained by Simon Edwards, simon.edwards at linuxha.net.

There is also a users mailing list - see:

http://linuxha.net/mailman/listinfo/linuxha-users_linuxha.net

Simon Edwards, 06/12/2005.