Specifications

LifeKeeper Administration
Overview
LifeKeeper does not require administration during operation. LifeKeeper works automatically to
monitor protected resources and to perform the specified recovery actions if a fault should occur. You
use the LifeKeeper GUI in these cases:
l Resource and hierarchy definition. LifeKeeper provides these interface options:
l LifeKeeper GUI.
l LifeKeeper command line interface.
l Resource monitoring. The LifeKeeper GUI provides access to resource status information
and to the LifeKeeper logs.
l Manual intervention. You may need to stop servers or specific resources for maintenance or
other administrative actions. The LifeKeeper GUI provides menu functions that allow you to
bring specific resources in and out of service. Once applications have been placed under
LifeKeeper protection, they should be started and stopped only through these LifeKeeper
interfaces. Starting and stopping LifeKeeper is done through the command line only.
See GUI Tasks and Maintenance Tasks for detailed instructions on performing LifeKeeper
administration, configuration and maintenance operations.
Error Detection and Notification
The ability to provide detection and alarming for problems within an application is critical to building
the best total fault resilient solution. Since every specific application varies on the mechanism and
format of failures, no one set of generic mechanisms can be supplied. In general, however, many
application configurations can rely on the Core system error detection provided within LifeKeeper.
Two common fault situations are used to demonstrate the power of LifeKeeper's core facilities in the
topicsResource Error Recovery Scenario and Server Failure Recovery Scenario.
LifeKeeper also provides a complete environment for defining errors, alarms, and events that can
trigger recovery procedures. This interfacing usually requires pattern match definitions for the system
error log (/var/log/messages), or custom-built application specific monitor processes.
N-Way Recovery
N-Way recovery allows different resources to fail over to different backup servers in a cluster.
Return to Protected Resources
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