Linux Showroom » OpenSuSE

High available NFS4 server with drbd 0.8, pacemaker 1.0, heartbeat, openais on OpenSUSE 11.1

Fabio — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:07:42 +0000

For my podcast project I got five new root servers which are all connected internally through a switch. Two of the servers are connected directly over a crossover cable. Those two servers have 3 NICs, the other 2 servers have 2 NICs.

I share the website’s HTML, images and other resources through the NFS server to all five servers. All servers work as webservers with nginx and PHP-fpm. Each server also runs one more specific service: database master, solr master, cron jobs / crawler processes, Varnish / HAproxy.

The two directly connected servers share the static website resources over drbd. Pacemaker, heartbeat and openais secure the high availability of my NFS4 server. Setting this up took quiet a bit of fiddeling as there are how-tos for so many different (and outdated) versions are floating around the internet.

This post originated from the Linux Showroom feed. Please check out Linux Showroom for more posts.

High available NFS4 server with drbd 0.8, pacemaker 1.0, heartbeat, openais on OpenSUSE 11.1

php-fpm runlevel start script for OpenSuSE 11.1

Fabio — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:44:34 +0000

Nowadays OpenSUSE comes with almost all packages I need to run a fast and reliable webserver. As I have written before I use nginx and php-fpm for our podcast service.

You can get up-to-date packages of nginx through OpenSuSE’s build service. I have not yet found a RPM package of php-fpm though. Therefore I compile it myself. This works well and I have the advantage that I can customize by PHP package.

But there is also one disadvantage. There is no system runlevel script available this way. So you cannot make use of the rc stuff on OpenSuSE and start PHP at boot time. As I have quiet a few machines to administer I decided to write my own runlevel script to start php-fpm.

Looking closer into the stuff that is already delivered with the php-fpm package is a powerful start script. I took it as the basis of my script. I had to modify it only in a few places. Big thanks to the author(s)!

It will take a few easy steps to get php-fpm running after booting.

Download my modified php-fpm script to your server’s runlevel directory (/etc/rc.d).
Rename the file by removing the file extension (.txt)
Give your superuser (root) rights to execute it.
Open the file php-fpm in your favorite editor (Vim, emacs, joe, …).
Modify the three lines (php_fpm_BIN=, php_fpm_CONF=, php_fpm_PID=) on top to match your installation directory of php-fpm.
Save and close the file.
Start yast with yast runlevel and switch to expert mode with Alt+x
Activate php-fpm for runlevels 3 and 5 (or whatever suits you). Save your changes with Alt+o. That’s it!

Now your php-fpm installation starts on boot. If you ever have to reboot your machine you do not have to think about starting php-fpm manually as the system does it for you.

Let me know if this was helpful for you, if it works and if you have any questions!

This post originated from the Linux Showroom feed. Please check out Linux Showroom for more posts.

php-fpm runlevel start script for OpenSuSE 11.1

System upgrade openSUSE 11.0 to openSUSE 11.1 with zypper

Fabio — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:47:45 +0000

I had to set up a server. The hoster offers openSUSE 11.0 at the moment but no openSUSE 11.1 yet. As I like to go with the latest and greatest I decided to upgrade the system to openSUSE 11.1 after using the hoster’s installation image for openSUSE 11.0. I searched on the web how a system upgrade should be done this time. (It seems to differ all the time.) I found a zypper command chain. Change the installation reposotories in /etc/zypp/repos.d to the new version and type:

zypper refresh
zypper dist-upgrade

I did excatly that. It did refresh a few packages but as I guessed immediately not enough. I tried over. It did not help. Here is the solution. Delete all subdirectories in /var/cache/zypper and execute the commands above again.

This post originated from the Linux Showroom feed. Please check out Linux Showroom for more posts.

System upgrade openSUSE 11.0 to openSUSE 11.1 with zypper

New software packages bundled with OpenSuSE 11.1

Fabio — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:15:14 +0000

The newest version of OpenSuSE got released today. OpenSuSE 11.1 brings more than 230 new features the press release says. As I keep my systems up to date thanks to smart and all the repositories only a number of these new feature are missing on my OpenSuSE 11.0 installations. The most important reason I quickly upgrade my desktop system is KDE. As I am still using KDE version 3 and the version that comes with OpenSuSE 11.1 is the same I have installed (KDE 3.5.10) this does not convince me to upgrade.

I did however discover new software (packages) in OpenSuSE 11.1 I have not known before. These packages are Tasque, Tellico, Twinkle, Monsoon, PulseAudio and Derby. I googled these terms and came up with the following.

Tasque is a simple task management app (TODO list) for the Linux Desktop. The screenshots remind me of the todo app that comes with the KDE Kontact tool.
Tellico is a KDE application for organizing your collections. Tellico allows you to enter your collection in a catalogue database.
Twinkle is a free software/open source VoIP softphone application for Linux. It uses the SIP protocol. It also incorporates a GPL implementation of the ZRTP and SRTP security protocols and MD5 digest authentication.
Monsoon is a fully featured bittorrent GUI supporting many advanced features such as selective downloading, automatic port forwarding via uPnP and RSS integration.
PulseAudio is a sound server for POSIX and Win32 systems.
Apache Derby is an open source relational database implemented entirely in Java.

I’d like to say even before I tried it out openSUSE just got better!

This post originated from the Linux Showroom feed. Please check out Linux Showroom for more posts.

New software packages bundled with OpenSuSE 11.1