High availabiltiy and heartbeats

I'm sitting at the moment on my 'new' laptop – its amazing specification of a near 300 Mhz PII processor with 128Mb RAM – I am happy to be sitting hear listening to the fan whizzing away – as when I installed Ubuntu (www.ubuntulinux.org/) a common problem with ACPI got in the way of most of the laptops power management. Despite many failed attempts to get it working I rebuilt the laptop with the command “linux no acpi” - and therefore it defaulted to apm – which sorted out all my problems.

Anyway – to the point – the reason why I installed Ubuntu was down to a friend – Linux hardcore that chap – who pretty much said “It's linux for human beings” - sounds good to me i thought – but despite the shoddy power management – I have spent some time playing with various features.

One of the best features is the synaptic package manager – A simple interface where you point and click what packages you want and what you want to remove, the best thing about it, is that it sorts out all the package dependencies for you... Enter heartbeat!

In my initial research into high availability pointed to heartbeat - http://www.linux-ha.org/ and when a somewhat lazy attempt to get it installed onto my RedHat 9 dual boot box failed I thought there must be something more to this small package – Ubuntu, thankfully, did all the nasty work for me – so I am sitting with a fully installed system with the possibilities to make my laptop a high availability server in one of the following domains:

• Web servers

• LVS director servers

• Mail servers

• Database servers

• Firewalls

• File servers

• DNS servers

• DHCP servers

• Proxy Caching servers

• etc.

  My next step is to configure a virtual machine to be my other heartbeat and then I can really play – and see what this thing can do – plus i really need an idea!