Hi,

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 03:00:55PM +0100, Alain.Moulle wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to clearly evaluate the risk of split brain and the risk of 
> dual-fencing with pacemaker/openais in
> the case I can't chose anything else but having only *one* network for 

Oops.

> totem protocol :
>  
>  Let's say we have a two-nodes cluster with stonith resources :
>  - if there is a problem on one node (not a network pb) :
>               the other will became DC (if not yet) and fence the node 
> in failure.
>  - if there is a network failure between one node and the eth switch :
>             each node does not get any token anymore from the other 
> node, but only the
>             DC has the right to take a decision in the cluster and 
> specifically the decision to fence the
>             other node, so the DC node should fence the other.
>             The only problem I can see here is if the "not-DC" node 
> declares itself as new DC before to
>             be fenced, and therefore will also decide to fence the other 
> node, which could lead to a
>             dual-fencing situation.  So the fence request from the 
> initial DC node should happen before the
>             DC Deadtime value (default 60s) to eliminate any risk of 
> dual-fencing.

Have you ever tried this? If that indeed makes the non-DC node
wait with fencing, then that may help.

> In any cases, we can't have a split-brain situation if a fence does not 
> complete successfully. Am I right ?

No. It is a split-brain situation as soon as nodes can't
communicate.

> And if we have a more than two-nodes cluster, it seems similar for me ...

No, because the partition without quorum can't fence nodes. That
makes things simpler and more predictable.

> Am I right about all this ? or did I miss something somewhere ?

I'm not sure if my response helps at all. You should test this
thoroughly. For instance, we have one bugzilla open for
external/ipmi where nodes did shoot each other on split brain.

Thanks,

Dejan

> Thanks for you response.
> Alain Moullé
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