The STONITH daemon is a cluster-wide abstraction for STONITH[1] topology.
That is, an individual STONITH device can only reset certain machines in the cluster - perhaps one, or perhaps all. The STONITH daemon hides these details of the STONITH device topology and provides a single uniform interface to the STONITH devices in the cluster.
This makes for a uniform interface, and also abstracts it to a high enough level that entities other than the CRM[2] can use it, if they wish. In other words - it's a reusable component. This is to allow it to be used directly by GFS[3] (global file system), if that proves desirable.
STONITH[1], ResourceFencing[4], SmartFencingDaemonProposal[5], FencingSubsystemRequirements[6], LocalResourceManager/FencingOperations[7], LocalResourceManager/StonithAgents[8]
| [1] | http://www.linux-ha.org/STONITH |
| [2] | http://www.linux-ha.org/CRM |
| [3] | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_File_System |
| [4] | http://www.linux-ha.org/ResourceFencing |
| [5] | http://www.linux-ha.org/SmartFencingDaemonProposal |
| [6] | http://www.linux-ha.org/FencingSubsystemRequirements |
| [7] | http://www.linux-ha.org/LocalResourceManager/FencingOperations |
| [8] | http://www.linux-ha.org/LocalResourceManager/StonithAgents |
This information provided courtesy of the Linux-HA project at http://linux-ha.org/