RHBA-2011:1716 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated piranha package that fixes various bugs is now available for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

Piranha provides high-availability and load balancing services for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. The piranha package contains 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 update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, failure to start a single nanny daemon could terminate all the

other nanny daemons. As a result, piranha could stop routing requests to real
servers if one service monitor failed. This update adds a new option in the
lvs.cf file, "hard_shutdown". The old behavior is retained with the default
setting of 1. If a 0 value is set, a single nanny does not kill all nannies but
the system needs manual intervention. (BZ#593728)

• Previously, the piranha-gui init script searched for programs in the current

working directory. As a consequence, SELinux Access Vector Cache (AVC) denials
could be generated when starting the piranha-gui service in unusual locations
without the "service" utility. The init script has been modified to avoid this
problem. Now, SELinux denials are no longer logged. (BZ#628872)

• Adding or removing Virtual Service descriptions in the LVS configuration

requires restarting the pulse daemon (service pulse reload). Prior to this
update all services (running or not) were started. When reloading the pulse
daemon, if a service did not have any servers defined, the pulse daemon
terminated unexpectedly with a segmentation fault. With this update, only
running services are restarted. Now, the pulse daemon reloads as expected.
(BZ#703146)

• Prior to this update, terminating a nanny or an lvs daemon did not trigger a

failover to the backup server. As a consequence, the load balancer stopped
working. With this update, the pulse daemon shuts down if either the nanny
daemon or the lvs daemon terminates. Now, the load balancer works as expected.
(BZ#706881)

• Previously, the piranha-gui utility reported an HTTP 414 error (Request-URI

Too Long) if too many virtual servers were defined. As a consequence, when
trying to edit a virtual server, the error message "Too many arguments in the
URL" appeared. With this update, the number of defined virtual servers does not
affect the length of the URI. Now, error messages are no longer reported.
(BZ#708036)

• This update adds the 255.255.254.0 network mask to the piranha-gui drop-down

menus. (BZ#729828)

All users of piranha are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which fixes
these bugs.

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
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Load Balancer (for RHEL Server) 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Load Balancer (for RHEL Server) 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Load Balancer (for RHEL Server) from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Load Balancer (for RHEL Server) from RHUI 6 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 593728 - a failure to start a single nanny kills off *all* running nannys
• BZ - 628872 - init script searches cwd which can cause SELinux denials
• BZ - 703146 - "service pulse reload" is resulting in lvsd segfaulting
• BZ - 706881 - Unstable loadbalancer (piranha)
• BZ - 708036 - "TOO MANY ARGUMENTS IN THE URL" error

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)