Kriek's blog

In a previous article, Introduction to Veritas Cluster Server , I gave a general overview of the VCS product and how it's put together and what you can do with it.  In this article I'll give a general overview of how you go about configuring it. Before writing this, I have had no dealings with with product before, so hopefully what I cover here will help some lazy folk out there to quickly get an idea of what configuring this product is about.  I'm going to be looking at it from a Solaris perspective, since I believe most of the deployments of this product out in the field is on Solaris, and it's what I may have to support and perhaps you too.  I think it's very similar to the way it's done on Red Hat, so don't fear. Files The configuration files are normally in: /etc/VRTSvcs/conf/config There are two main configuration files: main.cf that defines the entire cluster. types.cf that defines the resource types.  There are more like the above, if mo...

Regardless of outages and platform problems Blackberry is experiencing, I believe the phone that always tends to win in the long run is the one that wins both with the user interface and durability.  Early on this was Nokia, the user interface was intuitive, steps were thought through to happen in the way people would actually use it.  You make a call, you get an SMS at the same time, the SMS won't stop you from using DTMF tones to navigate your voice mail, when deciding to read the SMS the default options enable you to reply or erase with the easiest to reach button.  This couldn't be said for Ericsson phones at the time, where the steps that I described on the Nokia phone was a pain on the Ericsson.  Durability wise Nokia also won.  I've never had a broken Nokia, I've only had one Ericsson phone and it broke a few times.  I suspect Nokia must have done something similar to what Apple is rumoured to do, have lots of internal designs and prototype...

I somehow managed to escape having to deal with Veritas products over the years. Now I have been tasked to deal with some of it, so I'm taking this opportunity to familiarise myself with it. The product I'm looking at more specifically is Veritas Cluster Server, which is a different product from their popular file system and backup products. Veritas is now also a Symantec product, but I'm looking specifically at the shape of the product before the Symantec acquisition, because it's the form I have to support. Hopefully the details I cover here will help others who also end up having to support a VCS installation. Description of VCS Veritas Cluster Server is software used to facilitate and manage application clusters. Examples of these would be to manage an Oracle database cluster, a web application stack, or handle the clustering of Veritas file system products, or various combinations of all of these in a global operation. I have been told it's a good pr...