Linux-HA Education

Welcome to the Linux-HA Education subproject!

It's our plan to provide material to help people do the tasks their job requires them to do. As such, this education section is more task-oriented, and less oriented to the Grand Overview of Life the Universe and Everything. We're writing this to help you learn what you need to know to do your job, to keep your job, and help you advance in your career - to the degree that having your systems be highly-available can help these things.

Note that the education section doesn't plan on providing reference material. Reference material will be elsewhere on the web site, and pointed to here as needed.

We are following a set of /ideas[1] many of which were inspired by Kathy Sierra[2] and her most excellent blog on Creating Passionate Users[3].

Curriculum Levels

We plan on dividing up our Linux-HA curriculum up into levels.

Here is the set of levels we're considering:

• /Motivational[4] - to help understand what the application of HA principles and software can do for you, and help explain the business value of High Availability in general, and Linux-HA in particular (suitable for managers, team leads, IT architects, planners).

• /Newbie[5] - SysAdmins[6] with little or no background in HA and none in release 2 Linux-HA

• /Novice[7] - SysAdmins[6] who have set up a test cluster, can do some things with their cluster and have a basic understanding of HA architecture concepts.

• Journey(wo)man[8] - SysAdmins[6] who have solid reliable knowledge of standard HA configuration, architecture, and Heartbeat, and have experience in deploying it

• /Expert[9] - SysAdmins[6] who know HA configuration and heartbeat extremely well, have done several deployments on it and also know its more advanced features well

Organization

The educational modules are organized by levels, with the material being arranged in a sensible order within each level, so that the concepts build on each other. Each module is intended to take no more than about 15 minutes each to complete. They're also designed to keep from boring you to tears, so you stand a fighting chance of learning something and having it stick.

Open Questions

Should we have roles and levels within each role? For example...

• Manager
• IT Architect

• SysAdmin[10]

Or maybe different tracks?

Documentation

(Under construction, last updated august 17th 2007) As of now, documentation can be added to this page. To make it easy to find the documentation you need, it is subdivided into different categories:

• Articles[11] - This link contains links to articles. These are howto-articles that help you accomplish tasks in an easy way.

• XML[12] - Still one of the best ways to manage your cluster, is by inserting and removing XML files to the cib.xml, using the cibadmin command. On this page you can find example scripts that may provide a reasonable starting point to create your own cluster.

• Screencasts[13] - Alan Robertson has created some nice screencasts that explain how to perform some common tasks on a Heartbeat cluster. You can find them here.

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This information provided courtesy of the Linux-HA project at http://linux-ha.org/