Introduction:
We have a couple of things planned for this month's meeting:
Unigroup Board of Director Elections:
Unigroup Members are welcome to volunteer to be on the Board of
Directors of Unigroup of New York, Inc. Please Email the board at
uniboard
DSL War Stories:
Did your Northpoint DSL go down in April? Did your DSL circuit remain
up but there simply was no Internet on it? Did you have a backup plan
for Internet Connectivity such as dial backup? Did you know your DSL
Router probably has built-in automatic dial backup and you could have
been prepared? If you had automatic dial-backup fully tested and
working prior to the DSL going down, when it did go down, and the
router automatically switched to backup, did you find that you now had
new routing problems preventing Internet connectivity? Are you dealing
with an ISP who offers dial-backup service? Did your provider drop the
Reverse DNS for the IP range configured in your dial-backup router and
firewall (without notice) such that sendmail took a full 60 seconds to
start up? Did you deal with a provider who's idea of dial-backup is a
single-user windows-style pop account which uses a single pop box to
route in-bound mail to hundreds of people spread across the country in a
handful remote offices? Did that same provider refuse to accept your
out-bound SMTP traffic even though you were using one of their dial-up
connections (login/password/their dynamic IP range), because they
simply did not believe that you were you and that you were one of their
customers? Did they force a dynamic IP range on you such that you
could no longer transmit SMTP to various sites such as AOL due to the
DUL? Did the entire Northpoint mess occupy so much of your time that
you simply didn't have time to put together a special April Unigroup
meeting (sorry about that)?
...can you tell? ...it wasn't fun! I have a couple of personal
of war stories to relate. I hope some Unigroup members have a
few of their own to discuss too. The main goal of the discussion
is what to have in place, what can and will go wrong, and what
to watch out for.
The Main Presentation:
The March 2001 Unigroup meeting was on Linux Beowulf Clustering. The May 2001 Unigroup meeting will be a followup meeting which will detail another aspect of Linux Clustering Technology: Fault Tolerant Highly Available Clusters. Our speaker, Nick Carr of Mission Critical Linux, will discuss aspects of High Availability and how this type of clustering may be used on Beowulf Clusters to build a robust and fault tolerant clustering environment. Mission Critical Linux's Convolo Cluster software is a high-availability cluster product for Linux which is based on the Open Source Kimberlite clustering technology.
Web Resources:
- Kimberlite http://oss.missioncriticallinux.com/projects/kimberlite/
- Convolo Cluster http://www.missioncriticallinux.com/products/convolo/
- Mission Critical Linux http://www.missioncriticallinux.com
- The Beowulf Project http://www.beowulf.org
- High Availability Cluster Checklist http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/lj-issues/issue80/4344.html
Description of Talk:
This talk follows on from earlier presentations on Linux high performance, Beowulf-style clusters. It describes recent advances in the area of Linux high availability clusters. Designed for deployment in commercial environments using standard, unmodified applications these clusters have, in most respects, achieved parity with traditional Unix commercial-market clusters.
The presentation will include a mid-level technical overview of high availability cluster technologies, describing the fundamental properties of these systems - including configuration details, primary algorithms, shared storage subsystems, and application implications. The presentation will also cover clustering technologies that are actively being worked on by the Linux community - including distributed lock managers and cluster file systems. The presentation is intended to be highly interactive, allowing attendees the maximum opportunity to learn about these interesting systems.
Mission Critical Linux will be sponsoring the food service at
this month's Unigroup meeting!
Thanks MCL!
Speaker Biography:
Nick Carr has 25 years experience in the IT industry in a career spanning multiple disciplines, including business development and product management, operating system engineering, technical training, pre-sales support, and customer hardware and software services.
Company Biography:
Mission Critical Linux Inc. offers enterprise-ready Linux professional services to help plan and deploy efficient and highly available Linux systems; custom engineering for specific development needs; and 24/7 support to ensure maximum systems availability and performance. By combining these services with ground-breaking Linux technologies such as Convolo Cluster Software and Secure Service Technology, the Company provides commercial Linux users with the tools needed to maximize the performance of their IT infrastructure. Headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, with offices in Santa Clara, California, Washington D.C., and Europe, Mission Critical Linux, Inc. can be reached at http://www.missioncriticallinux.com.
Complimentary Food and Refreshments will be served.
This now includes salads and sandwiches (eg. turkey, roast beef, chicken,
tuna, grilled eggplant, pasta salad, Caesar salad)!
Please join us for this meeting, you won't want to miss it!
unilist