[Linux-cluster] RHCS 4.0 HowTo?

[David.Sullivan]

I'm completely new to clustering and am trying to set up a "proof of
concept" configuration in-house.  Our customers run a back-office POS server
and must currently do a manual failover that involves moving hard drives if
the server fails.  Using VMware Workstation 5, I have created several VM's
configured with dual NICs and RHEL 4.0/RHCS 4.0.  System-config-cluster
seems to abstract so much from the Administrator that I'm having trouble
getting things working.  Some specific things I don't understand:

*  How do you tell it which NIC to use as a heartbeat, and which to use for
the services offered?  I have a private LAN set up that I want to use for
heartbeat, but don't think it's being used at all.  Both the public and
private IP's are set up in /etc/hosts.

*  Building on the above, is it wise for other cluster services (e.g. dlm)
to communicate across the private heartbeat link?  If so, how do I configure
that?

*  How does one add members to an existing cluster?  I found lots online
(including Red Hat's Knowledgebase) about how to do it with previous
versions, but I'm very unclear about RHCS 4.0.  I cloned my first VM, reset
all it's networking data, reset the hostname, and deleted the
/etc/cluster/cluster.conf file, but the "master" node won't push the cluster
configuration to it, so it sits there brain-dead.

*  Insofar as hardware fencing is required with RHCS 4.0, will I be able to
demonstrate failover functionality to management at all?  I'm basically
looking for a means to automagically fail over to a "hot standby" server.

TIA!


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