Heartbeat 1.0.1 released [LWN.net]

The High-Availability Linux Project (Linux-HA) aims to: "Provide a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) through a community development effort."

[Linux High Availability] The primary software product from Linux-HA is called heartbeat. Heartbeat: "implements serial, UDP, and PPP/UDP heartbeats together with IP address takeover including a nice resource model including resource groups. It currently supports multiple IP addresses and a simple two-node primary/secondary model. It is both extremely useful and quite stable at this point in time."

A number of the prominent sites using Linux-HA are listed on the Heartbeat Success Stories page.

Version 1.0.1 of heartbeat has been announced, this version is:

the first major stable release of the Linux-HA project since March 2001, and the culmination of a long series of successful beta releases. The major features in this stable release include support for many new STONITH devices, an application monitoring subsystem, unicast communications, standby capability, IP connection montoring (IPfail) feature, improved realtime performance, CCM membership subsystem, ability to specify fractional seconds in times, *BSD and Solaris compatibility, documentation improvements, extensions to heartbeat client API, etc.

Version 1.0.1 also includes a number of important bug fixes.

Heartbeat is available for download here.

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On the appropriateness of various image formats...

Posted Mar 10, 2003 21:08 UTC (Mon) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Jonathan et al.,

I've noticed several times now that you seem to incorporate within the occasional article (such as this one) a JPEG version of a logo that began life elsewhere as a GIF. While I applaud your efforts to avoid the use of GIFs, your seemingly automatic assumption that JPEG is an improvement is flawed in several respects:

As we're now all aware, the JPEG format may be as encumbered by patents as the GIF/LZW format is.
Despite its excellent performance on natural images, JPEG does not compress graphic images well. In this particular case, you've started with an image that ostensibly has 3 colors (background and two shades of red) plus some antialiasing (say, an extra 13 colors, for a total of 16), expanded it by a factor of six (4 bits to 24 bits), and then applied lossy compression that almost certainly results in an image that's still larger than the original--which, by definition, was lossless. (No, I haven't actually tested this particular image, but I did include a very similar example in my book, with precisely the results I've described here.)
The quality just, well...sucks. A lot. (It didn't even retain the white background color, which even JPEG should be able to handle.)

Upshot: use the best tool for the job. In this case (GIF conversion), that would be PNG. In cases involving photographic content, stick with JPEG (assuming you're OK with the patent issues). See this page and associated links for lots more details.

Greg Roelofs
PNG Group, etc.