Managing Serviceguard 12th Edition, March 2006

Understanding Serviceguard Software Components
How Package Control Scripts Work
Chapter 394
NOTE If you set <n> restarts and also set SERVICE_FAILFAST_ENABLED to YES,
the failfast will take place after <n> restart attempts have failed. It does
not make sense to set SERVICE_RESTART to “-R” for a service and also set
SERVICE_FAILFAST_ENABLED to YES.
While Services are Running
During the normal operation of cluster services, the package manager
continuously monitors the following:
• Process IDs of the services
• Subnets configured for monitoring in the package configuration file
• Configured resources on which the package depends
Some failures can result in a local switch. For example, if there is a
failure on a specific LAN card and there is a standby LAN configured for
that subnet, then the Network Manager will switch to the healthy LAN
card. If a service fails but the RESTART parameter for that service is set
to a value greater than 0, the service will restart, up to the configured
number of restarts, without halting the package.
If there is a configured EMS resource dependency and there is a trigger
that causes an event, the package will be halted.
During normal operation, while all services are running, you can see the
status of the services in the “Script Parameters” section of the output of
the cmviewcl command.
When a Service, Subnet, or Monitored Resource Fails,
or a Dependency is Not Met
What happens when something goes wrong? If a service fails and there
are no more restarts, if a subnet fails and there are no standbys, if a
configured resource fails, or if a configured dependency on a
special-purpose package is not met, then a failover package will halt on
its current node and, depending on the setting of the package switching
flags, may be restarted on another node. If a multi-node or system
multi-node package fails, all of the packages that have configured a
dependency on it will also fail.