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Chapter 5. Fencing: Configuring STONITH

STONITH is an acronym for "Shoot The Other Node In The Head" and it protects your data from being corrupted by rogue nodes or concurrent access.
Just because a node is unresponsive, this does not mean it is not accessing your data. The only way to be 100% sure that your data is safe, is to fence the node using STONITH so we can be certain that the node is truly offline, before allowing the data to be accessed from another node.
STONITH also has a role to play in the event that a clustered service cannot be stopped. In this case, the cluster uses STONITH to force the whole node offline, thereby making it safe to start the service elsewhere.
For more complete general information on fencing and its importance in a Red Hat High Availability cluster, see Fencing in a Red Hat High Availability Cluster.

5.1. Available STONITH (Fencing) Agents

Use the following command to view of list of all available STONITH agents. You specify a filter, then this command displays only the STONITH agents that match the filter.
pcs stonith list [filter]