Well, recently I stepped up to watch our cluster environments … Michael has a good howto on how to watch Windows Cluster environments in the NSclient++ wiki.
Now, this has it’s own perks … Which I stumbled upon when trying to write a Linux-HA OCF resource agent for the Nagios NRPE server. Combining that Linux-HA with SLES10 is a good thing generally, but using startproc in that resource agent is not such a good idea.
Apparently Novell (or SuSE GmbH) thought it might be wise to include some additional logic into the wrapper. startproc, checkproc and killproc do check for the name of the executable. So if you try to start an additional process with the same name, you need to dig a bit deeper.
For this to work, you need two additional things (quotations directly from man 8 startproc):
-p pid_file
(Former option -f changed due to the LSB specification.) Use an alternate pid file instead of the default (/var/run/<basename>.pid). The pid read from this file is being matched against the pid of running processes that have an executable with specified path of the program. In order to avoid confusion with stale pid files, a not up-to-date pid will be ignored.
Now, then apparently this isn’t enough. startproc is still refusing to start a second process.
-i ignore_file
The pid found in this file is used as session id of the same binary program which should be ignored by startproc.