pcs STONITH

stonith.jpgIf you’ve never setup a cluster in RedHat/CentOS using pcs – I strongly suggest you give it a try! Lots of fun!

PCS is the name of command line interface for RedHat Cluster, it allows you to manage Pacemaker (open-soure cluster resource manager) and Corosync (cluster membership and messaging layer). Please visit ClusterLabs.orgfor more information.

pcs stonith

One of the more interesting things (although very standard for cluster setups) in setting cluster up is STONITH. It’s a fencing mechanism with an impressive number of mechanisms supplied by default.

Fencing takes care of monitoring your cluster closely with a view of fencing (blocking) a faulty node as soon as the node is confirmed to be malfunctioning.

Specifically, if there’s a timeout or an error with starting a service, your pcs stonith setup may dictate that this condition is bad enough for the server (or VM) to be rebooted or completely shut down.

STONITH meaning

STONITH is actually an acronym, and it means Shoot The Other Node In The Head. Quite a violent name for a high availability feature, don’t you think?

See Also