Appologies to the list for the delay in posting this summary!
My original message, requested information on the DECSafe Available Server
product, specifically user experiences, and such. I received a nice number
of replies, which I will summarize below. The general concensus is that,
although it's a bear to install and/or configure, once running it works
pretty well.
Although I appreciate the DEC employees who wrote, most of the content
was more oriented towards marketing, feature discussion, etc. I was
primarily interested in how it plays in the *real world* so to speak,
so I have only included comments below that relate to actual installation,
confuguration, and useage experiences.
Thanks to the following kind individuals for their insights:
sanghvi_at_proto.wilm.ge.com (arun sanghvi)
roy_manning_at_ccmsmtpgw.gam.com
Richard_Fleming_at_ccmsmtpgw.gam.com
jpt_at_rixrax.enet.dec.com (Jari Tavi)
cherkus_at_UniMaster.COM
debbie_at_hades.business.co.uk
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We have been trying to make DECsafe to work for last one year.
We had DEC's experts on site for few months. It kind of works.
If it is up to me, I will go with a different approach [ e.g.
raid 5, dual processor etc] to accomplish high reliablity.
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We are using it and it works very well, switch-over in minutes should a
machine fail. You must configure it correctly (read the manual), e.g. if
you don't use ntp on the machines using DEC Safe you can have all sorts of
problems, but the manual DOES say you must have ntp installed.
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We have been using DecSafe-ASE for some time now, and all is working well.
We had a lot of trouble configuring and testing initially, but this was
mostly due to bugs and inexperience with the product (both ours and DECs!).
The only MAJOR config problem is that the 'pair' of hosts must both appear
in the /etc/hosts file on BOTH machines. This is because ASE starts before
inetd, and therefore can't resolve the address of its partner - if it can't
see it's partner, it will try to acquire the service.... The way to avoid
this is to ensure that the local host, and the 'partner' system are both in
the hosts file on both systems.
Also, a good piece of advice on the configuration 'theory'. Each machine in
the pair has an IP address (as usual), but if you want transparent fail-over,
try adding an IP alias. Use this as a 'floating third IP address' and
configure it on the machine which has the 'service' which you want to use.
This way your users always connect to the same 'host name', but it may be on
the standby machine or the primary machine. One at a time of course.
Finally, don't forget that the discs can only be accessed by the primiary or
secondary machine one at a time - ie. both machines cannot have a disc
mounted at the same time.
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| Mike Godsey mgodsey_at_medio.com |
| On-Line MIS (206) 867-5500 x286 |
| Medio Multimedia, Inc. |
| Redmond, WA |
| <A HREF="http://www.Medio.Net/users/mgodsey/">Mike Godsey </A> |
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Received on Thu Apr 13 1995 - 13:58:22 NZST