Hi Folks! This email is my summary of what happened at the first ever LinuxFailSafe symposium which took place on 31 March, 2000. There were around 25 people attending, representing the following companies: SuSE, SGI, Mission Critical Linux, TurboLinux, VA Linux, Red Hat, Compaq, tummy.com, Caldera, Eluminant, WireX, Continental Divide Robotics, and Lucent Technologies. Oracle was unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts, and Alpha Processor was unable to make it due to a snow storm at the Colorado/New-Mexico border :-(. We had an excellent showing of people with keen interest in High-Availability technologies for Linux. Each participant received a bound copy of the newly-released LinuxFailSafe Functional Specification and Architecture document, and SGI's IRIS FailSafe programmer's manual. The event was hosted by Alan Robertson of SuSE (i.e. "me"). Presentations were made by the following people: Volker Wiegand, SuSE Senior Manager, Strategic Alliances Alan Robertson, SuSE High-Availability Architect Simon Patience, SGI Director - Core Linux Mayank Vasa, SGI MTS and LinuxFailSafe Gatekeeper Rebecca Underwood, SGI Manager, Desktop and Systems Administration Software Lars Marowsky-Bree, SuSE Senior Developer, High-Availability The following topics were covered: Welcome and background: Alan Robertson Goals of Open Sourcing: Simon Patience Failsafe Functionality and Architecture: Mayank Vasa Rhino Infrastructure and LinuxFailSafe GUI: Rebecca Underwood Open Development Issues: Lars Marowsky-Bree Relationships to other Linux-HA projects: Alan R. LinuxFailSafe and the Community: Volker Wiegand The presentations were well-received, and SGI and SuSE provided attendees got a good background on LinuxFailSafe, its basic functions and future prospects as an open source product. I will post links to the slides for the talks on the LinuxFailSafe area of the Linux-HA web site as soon as they are available. The legal aspects of the port were discussed along with the features of LinuxFailSafe, current status and missing features and functions. Although the hardware shipped for a demonstration was not available due to a problem with FedEx, Rebecca Underwood did an excellent job of explaining the GUI system through a series of artistic renderings on the large white board in the room. Lars gave a good overview of what other components we need to make it a complete system, and I led a discussion on how LinuxFailSafe might relate to the current heartbeat project, and Stephen Tweedie's future HA project. Since I will be leading the SuSE effort to help make LinuxFailSafe a reality, I will be spending less time on heartbeat than he had anticipated he might. However I also stated that LinuxFailSafe would not make heartbeat go away any time soon, and that perhaps some of it would be incorporated into the LinuxFailSafe project. Mike Wangsmo of Red Hat was largely noncommittal, stating that Red Hat currently has an HA plan, and it will be unable to change it for a while. Mike also suggested that Stephen Tweedie's future path was unlikely to be significantly affected by the introduction of LinuxFailSafe into the Linux community. I received many positive comments from the attendees about all aspects of the symposium, and a great deal of support and enthusiasm was expressed by nearly every participant. It appears that the community is very interested in LinuxFailSafe and it will likely become the standard in the Linux environment when it becomes available, and I would anticipate nearly unanimous support for this platform as the future of High-Availability on Linux. In addition, I was personally very pleased with the outcome of the symposium, and felt that it went very well and had a very positive impact. You can find these notes and other links on the Linux-HA web site at: http://linux-ha.org/LinuxFailSafe/ Thanks to SuSE for agreeing to host this Symposium, and thanks to SGI for supplying both FailSafe itself and excellent presentations in support of the community on short notice! Around six of the attendees also contributed to the HA BOF session at the CLIQ Linux conference on Saturday as well. -- Alan Robertson alanr@suse.com