Meetings:2010-04-15

=Location= Oak View Branch of the Siouxland Libraries in Sioux Falls, Room 3 at 6:30pm

=Agenda= High Availability Tools: Keep on Servin'

Alex Dean will cover High Availability tools for Linux at the April Siouxland Linux Users Group meeting. These tools are critical to the delivery of enterprise-level services.

The room will open at 6pm for setup.

An informal question-and-answer session will follow the presentation.

We will have free bootable CDs for folks who want to try GNU/Linux without installing it on their computer. Distributions include Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora with Gnome, Fedora with KDE, and various flavors of Debian.

There is no cost to attend the meeting or to join.

=Minutes= Prepared by Glenn

Alex Dean gave an overview of DRBD and Heartbeat, two high availability tools for Linux.

DRBD is used to manage a single data set mirrored on two computers, one computer acting as the primary server, and the other as secondary. The computers can be in separate server farms, if desired. Heartbeat works with DRBD to switch the secondary server to primary quickly and automatically, if the primary server should fail.

Alex went through the configuration files for both programs, and outlined situations in which both servers may be running, but they each think the other host has disappeared from the network. This situation usually occurs more frequently than the loss of a server, he said.

In the Q-and-A session that followed his talk, he outlined a number of ways that DRBD and Heartbeat could be used with MySQL database servers.

His recommended resource for DRBD is http://www.drbd.org/users-guide. The recommendations for heartbeat are http://www.linux-ha.org/HeartbeatTutorials, http://people.linbit.com/~florian/heartbeat-users-guide/, and http://www.clusterlabs.org.

Alex works for IPS MeteoStar in Denver, CO, a company that provides high availability solutions for weather data worldwide to government and industry. See http://weather.meteostar.com/ or www.meteostar.com/company/news.html for more information about IPS MeteoStar.

Topic Suggestions
We gleaned a few more meeting topics from the group:
 * Little Utilities for non-geeks;
 * Geotagging your digital photographs; and
 * Regular (monthly) install-fest / help sessions for new Linux users.

Attendance
Twelve people attended the April meeting.

May Meeting
Steve and Rob will present May's topic on VoIP - using the internet for making phone calls. They have been tweaking their Asterisk servers for a few months, and should be ready to go at 6:30pm on Thursday, May 20, at the Oak View Branch meeting room 3.

Free Linux live CDs will be available for folks who want to try Linux for the first time.

June Meeting
Topic TBA

July Meeting
No formal meeting: Barbecue or Pizza Party

Future topics
General help, video streaming, FreeNAS, Utilities for Non-geeks