Developers guide

Chapter 8

Operating System Best Practices 66

Once you downloaded those packages, you need to modify the logging configuration file (conf/log.conf)

with something like the following example. Note that log4perl is almost the same as log4j, so you should

be able to find a lot of documentation online.

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE=Log::Dispatch::FileRotate

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.filename=/usr/local/pf/logs/packetfence.log

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.mode=append

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.autoflush=1

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.size=51200000

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.max=5

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.layout=PatternLayout

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{MMM dd HH:mm:ss} %X{proc}

(%X{tid}) %p: %m (%M)%n

High Availability

A high availability setup (active/passive) for PacketFence can be created using two PacketFence servers

and the following open source utilities:

Linux-HA (www.linux-ha.org) A daemon that provides cluster infrastructure

to its clients. Heartbeat would be responsible

for starting the PacketFence services,

eventually

DRBD (www.drbd.org) A network based raid-1.

Since PacketFence stores most of its information in a MySQL database, the two PacketFence redundant

servers need to share this database in a way or another.

There are different options to share the database between the two PacketFence servers:

∏ A local MySQL database server on each PacketFence box configured to store its databases on a remote

partition (a LUN on a SAN for example)

Caution

You have to make sure that only one database server is running at each time (don’t

double-mount the partition)

∏ A local MySQL database server on each PacketFence box and replication of the database partition using

DRBD

∏ A remote MySQL database server with its own high availability setup

In this document, we describe the second option that involves DRBD.

We assume that:

∏ you are using RedHat Enterprise 5 or CentOS 5.

∏ pf1 is the first PacketFence server