RHBA-2008:0409 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated piranha package that fixes several bugs is now available.

Description

Piranha provides high-availability and load balancing services for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. It includes various tools to administer and configure the
Linux Virtual Server (LVS), as well as the heartbeat and failover
components. LVS is a dynamically-adjusted kernel routing mechanism, that
provides load balancing, primarily for Web and FTP servers.

This updated package fixes the following bugs:

• when "lvs.cf" contained blank lines, pulse failed to start, and a

"pulse: error parsing /etc/sysconfig/ha/lvs.cf at line [x]: quotation
mismatch" error occurred.

• the pulse init scripts returned incorrect error codes, which prevented

the status command from being called correctly. In this updated package,
the pulse init scripts are Linux Standard Base (LSB) compliant, which
resolves this issue.

• the gratuitous ARP packets sent by "send_arp", which is called by pulse,

did not comply with RFC 2002. When a failover event occurred,
incorrectly-formed gratuitous ARP packets did not convince RFC-compliant
routers, and layer 3 switches, to update their ARP caches. This caused
network problems when a failover occurred. In this updated package, the
gratuitous ARP packets are RFC 2002 compliant, which resolves this issue.

• when two virtual servers shared a single virtual IP address, and one of

the servers was deactivated, the virtual IP address stayed active on both
servers, which would have caused problems in the event of a failover. In
this updated package, pulse no longer skips all LVS services if the first
service is deactivated, which resolves this issue.

• when the "display_errors = On" option was configured in "/etc/php.ini",

PHP errors appeared while viewing the Piranha configuration webpage, making
the webpage unreadable. In this updated package, the PHP errors no longer
occur, which resolves this issue.

Users of piranha are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which
resolves these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability for x86_64 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability for x86_64 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability for x86_64 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability (for RHEL Server) from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability (for RHEL Server) from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 202465 - Pulse does not properly parse lvs.cf
• BZ - 243278 - Wrong init script
• BZ - 245788 - Piranha send_arp utility generates incorrectly-formed gratuitous ARP's (patch to fix attached)
• BZ - 249312 - the VIP doesnt go down, where the first service deactivated
• BZ - 338101 - php errors in piranha made visible by display_errors = On in /etc/php.ini

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)