About three years ago, I was planning a new server setup that would run our new portal as well as e-mail, databases, DNS and so forth. One of the most important goals was to create a redundant solution, so that if one of the servers failed, it wouldn't affect company operation.

I looked through a lot of the redundant solutions available for Linux at the time, and with most of them, I had trouble getting all the services we needed to run redundantly. After all, there is a very big difference in functionality between a Sendmail dæmon and a PostgreSQL dæmon.

In the end, though, I did find one solution that worked very well for our needs. It involves setting up a disk mirror between machines using the software DRBD and a high-availability monitor on those machines using Heartbeat.

DRBD mirrors a partition between two machines allowing only one of them to mount it at a time. Heartbeat then monitors the machines, and if it detects that one of the machines has died, it takes control by mounting the mirrored disk and starting all the services the other machine is running.

I've had this setup running for about three years now, and it has made the inevitable hardware failures unnoticeable to the company.

In this tutorial, I show you how to set up a redundant Sendmail system, because once you do that, you will be able to set up almost any service you need. We assume that your master server is called server1 and has an IP address of 192.168.1.1, and your slave server is called server2 and has an IP address of 192.168.1.2.

And, because you don't want to have to access your mail server on any of these addresses in case they are down, we will give it a virtual address of 192.168.1.5. You can, of course, change this to whatever address you want in the Heartbeat configuration that I discuss near the end of this article.

This high-availability solution works by replicating a disk partition in a master/slave mode. The server that is running as a master has full read/write access to that partition; whereas the server running as slave has absolutely no access to the partition but silently replicates all changes made by the master server.

Because of this, all the processes that need to access the replicated partition must be running on the master server. If the master server fails, the Heartbeat dæmon running on the slave server will tell DRBD that it is now the master, mount the replicated partition, and then start all the processes that have data stored on the replicated partition.

The first step for running a redundant system is having two machines ready to try it out. They don't need to have identical specs, but they should meet the following requirements:

You also should think carefully about which services you want running on both machines, as this will affect the amount of hard disk you will need to dedicate to replication across them and how you will store the configuration and data files of these services.

It's very important that you have enough space on this shared partition, because it will be the main data storage location for all of these services. So, if you are going to be storing a large Sendmail spool or a database, you should make sure it has more than enough space to run for a long time before having to repartition and reconfigure DRBD for a larger disk size.

Once you've made sure your machines are ready, you can go ahead and create an equal-sized partition on both machines. At this stage, you do not need to create a filesystem on that partition, because you will do that only once it is running mirrored over DRBD.

For my servers, I have one DRBD replicated drive that looks like this on my partition tables:

/dev/sda5      7916    8853   7534453+  83  Linux

Note: type fdisk -l at your command prompt to view a listing of your partitions in a format similar to that shown here. Also, in my case, the partition table is identical on both redundant machines.

The next step after partitioning is getting the packages for Heartbeat version 1.2+ and DRBD version 0.8+ installed and the DRBD kernel module compiled. If you can get these prepackaged for your distribution, it will probably be easier, but if not, you can download them from www.linux-ha.org/DownloadSoftware and www.drbd.org/download.html.

Now, go to your /etc/hosts file and add a couple lines, one for your primary and another for your secondary redundant server. Call one server1, the other server2, and finally, call one mail, and set the IP addresses appropriately. It should look something like this:

192.168.1.1    server1
192.168.1.2    server2
192.168.1.5    mail

Finally, on both your master and slave server, make a folder called /replicated, and add the following line to the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/drbd0    /replicated   ext3   noauto    0   0

After you've done that, you have to set up DRBD before moving forward with Heartbeat. In my setup, the configuration file is /etc/drbd.conf, but that can change depending on distribution and compile time options, so try to find the file and open it now so you can follow along. If you can't find it, simply create one called /etc/drbd.conf.

Listing 1 is my configuration file. I go over it line by line and add explanations as comments that begin with the # character.

# Each resource is a configuration section for a
# mirrored disk.
# The drbd0 is the name we will use to refer
# to this disk when starting or stopping it.

resource drbd0 {
  protocol C;
  handlers {
    pri-on-incon-degr "echo 'DRBD: primary requested but inconsistent!'
    ↪| wall; /etc/init.d/heartbeat stop"; #"halt -f";
    pri-lost-after-sb "echo 'DRBD: primary requested but lost!'
    ↪| wall; /etc/init.d/heartbeat stop"; #"halt -f";
  }

  startup {
    degr-wfc-timeout 120;    # 2 minutes.
  }

  disk {
    on-io-error   detach;
  }
# These are the network settings that worked best for me.
# If you want to play around with them, go
# ahead, but take a look in the man pages of drbd.conf
# and drbdadm to see what each does.

  net {
    timeout 120;
    connect-int 20;
    ping-int 20;
    max-buffers     2048;
    max-epoch-size  2048;
    ko-count 30;

# Remember to change this shared-secret on both the master
# and slave machines.

    cram-hmac-alg "sha1";
    shared-secret "FooFunFactory";
  }

  syncer {
    rate 10M;
    al-extents 257;
  }

# This next block defines the settings for the server
# labeled as server1.  This label should be in your
# /etc/hosts file and point to a valid host.

  on server1 {

# The following device will be created automatically by
# the drbd kernel module when the DRBD
# partition is in master mode and ready to write.
# If you have more than one DRBD resource, name
# this device drbd1, drbd2 and so forth.

    device     /dev/drbd0

# Put the partition device name you've prepared here.

    disk	     /dev/sda5;

# Now put the IP address of the primary server here.
# Note: you will need to use a unique port number for
# each resource.

    address   192.168.1.3:7788;
    meta-disk  internal;
  }

# This next block is identical to that of server1 but with
# the appropriate settings of the server called
# server2 in our /etc/hosts file.

  on server2 {
    device    /dev/drbd0;
    disk      /dev/sda5;
    address   192.168.1.2:7788;
    meta-disk internal;
  }
}

Now, let's test it by starting the DRBD driver to see if everything works as it should. On your command line on both servers type:

drbdadm create-md drbd0; /etc/init.d/drbd restart; cat /proc/drbd

If all goes well, the output of the last command should look something like this:

0: cs:Connected st:Secondary/Secondary ds:Inconsistent/Inconsistent r---
   ns:0 nr:0 dw:0 dr:0 al:0 bm:0 lo:0 pe:0 ua:0 ap:0
       resync: used:0/7 hits:0 misses:0 starving:0 dirty:0 changed:0
       act_log: used:0/257 hits:0 misses:0 starving:0 dirty:0 changed:0

Note: you always can find information about the DRBD status by typing:

cat /proc/drbd

Now, type the following command on the master system:

drbdadm -- --overwrite-data-of-peer primary drbd0; cat /proc/drbd

The output should look something like this:

0: cs:SyncSource st:Primary/Secondary ds:UpToDate/Inconsistent r---
   ns:65216 nr:0 dw:0 dr:65408 al:0 bm:3 lo:0 pe:7 ua:6 ap:0
       [>...................] sync'ed:  2.3% (3083548/3148572)K
       finish: 0:04:43 speed: 10,836 (10,836) K/sec
       resync: used:1/7 hits:4072 misses:4 starving:0 dirty:0 changed:4
       act_log: used:0/257 hits:0 misses:0 starving:0 dirty:0 changed:0

This means it is syncing your disks from the master computer that is set as the primary one to the slave computer that is set as secondary.

Next, create the filesystem by typing the following on the master system:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/drbd0

Once that is done, on the master computer, go ahead and mount the drive /dev/drbd0 on the /replicated directory we created for it. We'll have to mount it manually for now until we set up Heartbeat.

An important part of any redundant solution is properly preparing your services so that when the master machine fails, the slave machine can take over and run those services seamlessly. To do that, you have to move not only the data to the replicated DRBD disk, but also move the configuration files.

Let me show you how I've got Sendmail set up to handle the mail and store it on the replicated drives. I use Sendmail for this example as it is one step more complicated than the other services, because even if the machine is running in slave mode, it may need to send e-mail notifications from internal applications, and if Sendmail can't access the configuration files, it won't be able to do this.

On the master machine, first make sure Sendmail is installed but stopped. Then create an etc directory on your /replicated drive. After that, copy your /etc/mail directory into the /replicated/etc and create a symlink from /replicated/etc/mail to /etc/mail.

Next, make a var directory on the /replicated drive, and copy /var/mail, /var/spool/mqueue and any other mail data folders into that directory. Then, of course, create the appropriate symlinks so that the new folders are accessible from their previous locations.

Your /replicated directory structure should now look something like:

/replicated/etc/mail
/replicated/var/mail
/replicated/var/spool/mqueue
/replicated/var/spool/mqueue-client
/replicated/var/spool/mail

And, on your main drive, those folders should be symlinks and look something like:

/etc/mail -> /replicated/etc/mail
/var/mail -> /replicated/var/mail
/var/spool/mqueue -> /replicated/var/spool/mqueue
/var/spool/mqueue-client -> /replicated/var/spool/mqueue-client
/var/spool/mail -> /replicated/var/spool/mail

Now, start Sendmail again and give it a try. If all is working well, you've successfully finished the first part of the setup.

The next part is to make sure it runs, even on the slave. The trick we use is copying the Sendmail binary onto the mounted /replicated drive and putting a symlink to the binary ssmtp on the unmounted /replicated folder.

First, make sure you have ssmtp installed and configured on your system. Next, make a directory /replicated/usr/sbin, and copy /usr/sbin/sendmail to that directory. Then, symlink from /usr/sbin/sendmail back to /replicated/usr/sbin/sendmail.

Once that's done, shut down Sendmail and unmount the /replicated drive. Then, on both the master and slave computers, create a folder /replicated/usr/sbin and a symlink from /usr/sbin/ssmtp to /replicated/usr/sbin/sendmail.

After setting up Sendmail, setting up other services like Apache and PostgreSQL will seem like a breeze. Just remember to put all their data and configuration files on the /replicated drive and to create the appropriate symlinks.

Heartbeat is designed to monitor your servers, and if your master server fails, it will start up all the services on the slave server, turning it into the master. To configure it, we need to specify which servers it should monitor and which services it should start when one fails.

Let's configure the services first. We'll take a look at the Sendmail we configured previously, because the other services are configured the same way. First, go to the directory /etc/heartbeat/resource.d. This directory holds all the startup scripts for the services Heartbeat will start up.

Now add a symlink from /etc/init.d/sendmail to /etc/heartbeat/resource.d.

Note: keep in mind that these paths may vary depending on your Linux distribution.

With that done, set up Heartbeat to start up services automatically on the master computer, and turn the slave to the master if it fails. Listing 2 shows the file that does that, and in it, you can see we have only one line, which has different resources to be started on the given server, separated by spaces.

server1 IPaddr::192.168.1.5/24 datadisk::drbd0 sendmail

The first command, server1, defines which server should be the default master of these services; the second one, IPaddr::192.168.1.5/24, tells Heartbeat to configure this as an additional IP address on the master server with the given netmask. Next, with datadisk::drbd0 we tell Heartbeat to mount this drive automatically on the master, and after this, we can enter the names of all the services we want to start up—in this case, we put sendmail.

Note: these names should be the same as the filename for their startup script in /etc/heartbeat/resource.d.

Next, let's configure the /etc/heartbeat/ha.cf file (Listing 3). The main things you would want to change in it are the hostnames of the master/slave machine at the bottom, and the deadtime and initdead. These specify how many seconds of silence should be allowed from the other machine before assuming it's dead and taking over.

If you set this too low, you might have false positives, and unless you've got a system called STONITH in place, which will kill the other machine if it thinks it's already dead, you can have all kinds of problems. I set mine at two minutes; it's what has worked best for me, but feel free to experiment.

Also keep in mind the following two points: for the serial connection to work, you need to plug in a crossover serial cable between the machines, and if you don't use a crossover network cable between the machines but instead go through a hub where you have other Heartbeat nodes, you have to change the udpport for each master/slave node set, or your log file will get filled with warning messages.

debugfile /var/log/ha-debug
logfile /var/log/ha-log
logfacility     local0
keepalive 2
deadtime 120
initdead 120
serial  /dev/ttyS1
baud 9600
udpport 694
udp     eth0
nice_failback on
node server1
node server2

Now, all that's left to do is start your Heartbeat on both the master and slave server by typing:

/etc/init.d/heartbeat start

Once you've got that up and running, it's time to test it. You can do that by stopping Heartbeat on the master server and watching to see whether the slave server becomes the master. Then, of course, you might want to try it by completely powering down the master server or any other disconnection tests.

Congratulations on setting up your redundant server system! And, remember, Heartbeat and DRBD are fairly flexible, and you can put together some complex solutions, including having one server being a master of one DRBD partition and a slave of another. Take some time, play around with them and see what you can discover.