[CentOS] fencing nodes with drac under 5.9

Tue Mar 5 16:01:41 UTC 2013
Adam Wead <amsterdamos at gmail.com>

Hi all,

A recent update to CentOS 5.9 has broken my cluster's ability to fence
nodes.  I have two Dell's which are both fenced via their DRAC6 cards.  The
current configuration in cluster.conf for the fencing devices is:

<fencedevice agent="fence_drac5" cmd_prompt="admin1->"
ipaddr="192.168.251.11" login="fencer" name="ms1-drac" passwd="[omitted]"
secure="1"/>

After the updates, when one of the two systems comes online and starts the
cman service, it will startup fencing.  At that point it contacts the other
node and reboots it repeatedly, never allowing the system to come back
online.  If I disable the cman service and renable it after both systems
come back online, when cman starts up, it reboots the other and the process
starts over again.

Fencing with DRAC devices is not terribly well-documented, so I immagine
there was something in the update that changed the way this worked.  I
originally used system-config-cluster to created the configuration file,
but that had to tweak it adding the fence_drac5 agent manually because the
configuration tool didn't support it.  I also tried recreating the cluster
with conga, via luci and ricci, but no success there either.

Is anyone out there doing clustering with Dells and DRAC6 cards under
CentOS 5.9?  Or under CentOS 6 for that matter... I'm willing to update if
it fixes this.

thanks in advance,

...adam

____________________________________________
Adam Wead
Systems and Digital Collections Librarian
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
216.515.1960 (t)
215.515.1964 (f)