[Ssic-linux-announce] OpenSSI 1.9.1 released for Fedora Core 3

[En C. L. <en...@in...>]

The OpenSSI 1.9.1 development release for Fedora Core 3 is now available 
from OpenSSI.org.

The release notes are below.

Enjoy!

En Chiang

---
OpenSSI 1.9.1 is a development release, and is not necessarily suitable
for production use. If you want a stable release that is more suitable
for production use, please download OpenSSI 1.2.2 for Fedora Core 2,
Debian 3.1, or Red Hat 9 (deprecated). If you are more interested in
having the latest features, including a 2.6-based kernel, then read on!!

This release is based on a 2.6 kernel, the 2.6.10 kernel to be precise.
Many developers have contributed to this port, including
Aneesh Kumar, David Zafman, John Byrne, Kishore Sampathkumar, Laura Ramirez,
and Brian Watson. If you find any bugs, please report them to
either ssi...@li... or ssi...@li....
Once the OpenSSI 1.9.x series stabilizes, OpenSSI 2.0.0 will be released
for production use.

Besides the new 2.6 kernel, major enhancements have been made to OpenSSI's
integrated, highly-available version of LVS ("Linux Virtual Server"). It
now allows you to select which load balancing algorithm you wish to use,
even on a port-by-port basis! Another new feature is automatic registration
of servers on UDP ports, as has been done with TCP servers for a long time.
To support these features, a variety of changes have been made to the
/etc/cvip.conf file format, and to assist with understanding this new
format, a sample is automatically installed with OpenSSI 1.9.1, complete
with helpful comments. For more information, please see README.CVIP in
the documentation included with OpenSSI (/usr/share/docs/openssi/).

A major annoyance with HA-LVS has been fixed! Previously, if the ha-lvs
service was restarted (`service ha-lvs restart' on Fedora, similar
on Debian with the invoke-rc.d command), any services being load 
balanced also
had to be restarted, otherwise they would no longer be load balanced. This
is no longer an issue, because when the ha-lvs service starts up, it now
scans for any active servers that should be load balanced, rather than
only allowing them to register when they start up.

For those interested in the technical details of OpenSSI's adaptation
of LVS, the /proc/cluster/ip_vs_portweight file has been renamed to
/proc/cluster/lvs_portweight. Now that UDP is supported, this file has
been enhanced to include information about the protocol. Also, automatic
LVS service registration works with PF_INET6 sockets, which is used
by programs such as the newer versions of sshd.

An interesting new feature is support for dynamic nodes.  By adding an
'iprange <start_ip_addr> <end_ip_addr>' declaration to /etc/clustertab,
the DHCP server on the initnode will "promiscuously" hand out IP addresses
to any node not formally added with ssi-addnode. The node will then parse
its node number from the last number of the IP address (the bottom eight
bits). A /cluster/node<n> directory is created on-the-fly when a dynamic
node joins the cluster, and it is deleted when the node goes down. Note
that this feature needs to be disabled if you want to add more static nodes,
because it interferes with ssi-addnode's automatic detection of MAC 
addresses.

A related feature is support for traditional static nodes to use DHCP to
get an IP address for their cluster interconnect NIC. This is done by
specifying <DHCP> as the IP address in ssi-addnode or in the appropriate
field of /etc/clustertab. Neither feature is well documented, yet.

There have been several minor changes. The onclass command now uses colons
to delimit a list of node numbers. The loadlevel command can handle 
arguments
to a program. Debug code has been built as part of this kernel, to help
catch bugs before OpenSSI 2.0.0. Now dhcpd version 3 is required by
OpenSSI's mkdhcpd.conf command.

A variety of bugs have been fixed while preparing for this release. To learn
more, please see the ChangeLog for this release. For even more detail, you
can browse the ssic-linux-checkins archive, which can be found on 
OpenSSI.org.