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7.56. fence-agents

Updated fence-agents packages that fix two bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
Red Hat fence agents are a collection of scripts for handling remote power management for cluster devices. They allow failed or unreachable nodes to be forcibly restarted and removed from the cluster.

Bug Fixes

BZ#908409
Previously, when fencing a Red Hat Enterprise Linux cluster node with the fence_soap_vmware fence agent, the agent terminated unexpectedly with a traceback if it was not possible to resolve a hostname of an IP address. With this update, a proper error message is displayed in the described scenario.
BZ#908401
Due to incorrect detection on newline characters during an SSH connection, the fence_drac5 agent could terminate the connection with a traceback when fencing a Red Hat Enterprise Linux cluster node. Only the first fencing action completed successfully but the status of the node was not checked correctly. Consequently, the fence agent failed to report successful fencing. When the "reboot" operation was called, the node was only powered off. With this update, the newline characters are correctly detected and the fencing works as expected.
All users of fence-agents are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs.
Updated fence-agents packages that fix multiple bugs and add four enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The fence-agents packages provide the Red Hat fence agents to handle remote power management for cluster devices. The fence-agents allow failed or unreachable nodes to be forcibly restarted and removed from the cluster.

Bug Fixes

BZ#769798
The speed of fencing is critical because otherwise, broken nodes have more time to corrupt data. Prior to this update, the operation of the fence_vmware_soap fence agent was slower than expected when used on the VMWare vSphere platform with hundreds of virtual machines. With this update, the fencing process is faster and does not terminate if virtual machines without an UID are encountered.
BZ#822507
Prior to this update, the attribute "unique" in XML metadata was set to TRUE (1) by default. This update modifies the underlying code to use FALSE (0) as the default value because fence agents do not use these attributes.
BZ#825667
Prior to this update, certain fence agents did not generate correct metadata output. As a result, it was not possible to use the metadata for automatic generation of manual pages and user interfaces. With this update, all fence agents generate their metadata as expected.
BZ#842314
Prior to this update, the fence_apc script failed to log into APC power switches where firmware changed the end-of-line marker from CR-LF to LF. This update modifies the script to log into a fence device as expected.
BZ#863568
Prior to this update, the fence_rhevm agent failed to run the regular expression get_id regex when using a new href attribute. As a consequence, the plug status was not available. This update modifies the underlying code to show the correct status either as ON or OFF.

Enhancements

BZ#740869
This update adds the fence_ipdu agent to support IBM iPDU fence devices in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
BZ#752449
This update adds the fence_eaton agent to support Eaton ePDU (Enclosure Power Distribution Unit) devices in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
BZ#800650
This update adds symlinks for common fence types that utilize standards-based agents in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
BZ#818337
This update adds the fence_bladecenter agent to the fence-agents packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to support the --missing-as-off feature for the HP BladeSystem to handle missing nodes as switched off nodes so that fencing can end successfully even if a blade is missing.
BZ#837174
This update supports action=metadata via standard input for all fence agents.
All users of fence-agents are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.