Learning About Heartbeat

This page is an introductory documentation roadmap to the Linux-HA release 2 documentation. Eventually, this will be replaced by the Heartbeat Education project, when it's far enough along. But for now, this page will do for a documentation roadmap.

Although everyone has their own opinions about what the best order to do things in, the outline below is a reasonable one. These are in approximate order that I think you should consider them:

One good place to start for the newbie is with our introductory screencasts. These take about 10 minutes each to watch. They are simple, but each illustrates some key things about Linux-HA, and they're kind of fun (don't forget to turn on sound)

• Installing Heartbeat

• An Introduction to the GUI

Next, a reasonable and short narrative Getting Started document.

There is an extensive tutorial presentation from Linux.Conf.Au (LCA2007). I'd suggest watching the 90 minute video along with looking at the slides in parallel:

• Video - in Ogg/Theora format. (If you don't have an OGG/Theora player, try vlc.

• video with embedded Java player

• Slides from the talk (and lots more): (OpenDoc (ODF), PPT, PDF). These match the video above (for 90 minutes anyway) You can go on past the 90 minutes that goes with the video if you like, but be aware that some people have found that a few of the more advanced slides aren't as self-explaining as one might like.

Somewhere along the way (maybe here), it would be good to learn some theory about HA systems. There is an HA/DR educational blog with articles on Split-brain, quorum and fencing.

Next it would be good to read some of the Novell basic documentation. It isn't clear if this should be done before or after the talk above. That probably depends on your learning style among other things.

Everything above can probably be done in a half-day or less (skipping the extra slides above). Although this will give you a reasonable background, there's always more to learn:

• Another Getting Started document.

• If you are interested in Heartbeat architecture, then read the BasicArchitecture page.

• If you want to write your own resource agents, then the OCF RA page is worthwhile.

• Some simple CIB examples

• CIB User's Guide

• An article about ScoreCalculation

• CIB Idioms - some are simple, several are advanced, but all are explained.

• For the XML-knowledgeable: our annotated DTD.

• The configuring heartbeat page has an alternative set of suggested documents with ordering - including R1 information.

If you find errors in the online docs, please feel free to fix them.

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