Chapter 7. Initial Configuration
After installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, you must take some basic steps to set up both the LVS routers and the real servers in the LVS cluster. This chapter reviews these basic steps.
 | Note |
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The LVS router node that will become the active node once the cluster is started is also referred to as the primary node. When configuring an LVS cluster, use the Piranha Configuration Tool on the primary node. |
Configuring Services on the LVS Routers
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS installation program installs all of the components needed to set up an LVS cluster, but the appropriate services must be activated before configuring the cluster. For both of the LVS routers, set the appropriate services to start at boot time. There are three primary tools for setting services to activate at boot time under Red Hat Linux: the command line program chkconfig, the ncurses-based program ntsysv, or the graphical application serviceconf. All of these tools require root access.
 | Tip | |
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To attain root access, open a shell prompt and type the following command followed by the machine's root password:
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On the LVS routers, there are at least three services which need to be set to activate at boot time. They are:
The piranha-gui service (primary node only).
The pulse service.
The sshd service.
If you are clustering multi-port services or using firewall marks, you must also enable either the ipchains or iptables service, but not both.
 | Important |
|---|---|
If both ipchains and iptables are selected to activate on a particular runlevel, ipchains will take precedence. Although iptables is the default network packet filtering mechanism under the 2.4 kernel, it cannot be used concurrently with ipchains. At boot time, the kernel activates ipchains then attempts to activate iptables. If ipchains rules are present, the kernel will issue an error and fail to start iptables. |
It is best to set these services to activate in both runlevel 3 and runlevel 5. To accomplish this using chkconfig, type the following command for each service:
/sbin/chkconfig --level 35 daemon on |
In the above command, replace daemon with the name of the service you are activating. To get a list of services on the system as well as what runlevel they are set to activate on, issue the following command:
/sbin/chkconfig --list |
 | Warning |
|---|---|
Turning any of the above services on using chkconfig does not actually start the daemon. To do this use the /sbin/service. See the Section called Starting the Piranha Configuration Tool Service for an example of how to use the service command. |
For more information on runlevels and configuring services with ntsysv and serviceconf, refer to the chapter titled Controlling Access to Services in the Official Red Hat Linux Customization Guide.