Hi all, thank you for your feedback on my initial question. Now I had the time to look at the Novell documentation. Here's my personal conclusion to the question about wiki (WD) vs. Novell documentation (ND). All my experiences are related to HAv2:
* ND is well structured. You just can start to read until the end. Even more, just the table of contents gives you a nice overview of relevant issues. WD has no structure for me. Navigational elements are missing (IMHO). * If you look at the substance of ND, than I have also the feeling that you can find much of this stuff at WD. I emphasis: You CAN find it. * Worst thing of WD is searching and finding (IMHO). Many times the following happens to me: - I know I read something interesting and valuable at WD. - I put a search term to the search form to the right - I get pages of mailing list stuff which hits perfectly the searched term but doesn't find the page in WD. That happens to me so often in the last weeks, that I just can't tell you how annoying this is. What I'm wondering about is: The underlying MoinMoin does have search capabilities. Why are they not used? * ND and WS do have much information, BUT someone who is new to all that can't set it in a context. (IMHO) So often I had to ask myself: Mhhh, nice piece of information, but I don't know what it means. * The heartbeat documentation doesn't help you much to get the picture and relevant pieces. You have to collect many many single mosaic tiles very hard to get a rough model of HAv2. Everyone willing to go deeper than the provided GUI is interested in a deeper insight of the working of HAv2. * I started with HAv2 because I had the feeling (only by reading, not experience) it is mature enough to use it in a production environment. And I have to emphasis that someone who wants to use HAv2 wants to enhance availablity of the hosted services. Manageability is a key factor to get a system high available. And for that you have to have documentation that gives the user the feeling always to understand what he's doing and influencing. In opposite of that I was very often surprised about the cluster behaviour when I thought I do understand it now. * Back to documentation though: I'm missing a flow chart or a description of actions which describe the behaviour of all releted components. For example: What happens when I start a cluster node via 'rcheartbeat start', which are the steps taken. Which steps are influenced by which cluster properties set in ha.cf and cib.xml. What happens if I insert a primitive resource to the cluster via cibadmin? What happens when I change a constraint on a running cluster. Reading the logfile with a higher debug level givs you some insights, yes, but doesn't explain anything. I'm pretty sure that there are many guys (yes, no nice women until now) out there who have/had the same questions. I think it's proved by the kind of questions repeating on the mailing list. * Learning by doing is a good thing, but being forced to make try and error while having a definite target and timeline is not so nice. Conclusion: I would write down some pieces of information, give some snippets, explain topics further, write "Blabla for dummies" kind of guides, when you out there tell me where to write this down. And of course only if you're interested. Best regards Andreas Mock _______________________________________________ Linux-HA mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linux-ha.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-ha See also: http://linux-ha.org/ReportingProblems
