heartbeat2 and serial lines (HEARTBEAT)

This document (7000841) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Support Pack 2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Support Pack 1

Situation

The serial line configuration sometimes does not seem to work, for example a setting of

        serial /dev/ttyS0
        baud 115200

results in a serial setting of

        speed 19200 baud

and the serial connection seems to be unreliable with a lot of errors and warnings in the logfiles.

Jul 2 09:37:44 rumburak heartbeat: base64_to_binary: input length invalid.
Jul 2 09:37:44 rumburak heartbeat: [5108]: WARN: ha_msg_add_nv_depth: line doesn't contain '='

Resolution

The reason for this is the parsing of the ha.cf file and the serial lines capacity. First the order in the configuration has to be:

        baud 115200
        serial /dev/ttyS0

so the baud rate is set before the serial.

Second, even 115200 is probably not enough to transmit all the data necessary for heartbeat2. SUSE recommends to use a separate ethernet connection instead. If serial cannot be avoided it should be set to
        baud 230400
or
        baud 460800
if possible.

Disclaimer

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