[Ocfs2-announce] OCFS2 1.2.5 and OCFS2 TOOLS 1.2.4 Release

[Sunil Mushran]

All,

We are pleased to announce the release of OCFS2 1.2.5 and
OCFS2 Tools 1.2.4.

This release provides the long awaited configurable network
timeout feature. This feature was originally written by Andrew
Beekhof and ported to the OCFS2 1.2 tree by Jeff Mahoney, both
of Novell/SUSE.

The complete list of changes post OCFS2 1.2.4 are listed here:
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/news/article_11.html

The complete list of changes post OCFS2 Tools 1.2.3 are listed
here:
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/news/article_3.html

Please note that as we had to update the network protocol in the
1.2.5 release, we cannot support rolling upgrade from 1.2.4 or
earlier to 1.2.5. This change was necessitated by the configurable
timeout feature. (The updated protocol ensures that all nodes in
the cluster are using the same timeout values.)

Apart from the above feature, the only other change of consequence
relates to fencing. Due to user reports of nodes hanging during
fencing, we have made an internal change to ensure that it does
not. You can read more about this in the Quorum and Fencing section
in the FAQ.
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/dist/documentation/ocfs2_faq.html#QUORUM

As always, the latest edits in the FAQ are highlighted in red.

Subscribers to the Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 can upgrade to
the latest release by issuing the following commands:
	# up2date --install ocfs2-tools ocfs2console
	# up2date --install ocfs2-`uname-r`

Novell has already added all the patches bundled in this release
to their SLES10 SP1 tree. Please contact Novell for the release
schedule.

Packages for Red Hat's RHEL4 are available in the OCFS2 download
area for all eleven kernels (starting 2.6.9-22.EL) and five
architectures. Follow the links to download the appropriate
package. (Refer to the FAQ if you are unclear as to which package
you need to install.)

Lastly, due to popular demand, we are also announcing OCFS2 support
for Oracle Unbreakable Linux subscribers for uses other than just
with the Oracle RDBMS. This support is limited to the current
capabilities of the file system. You can review our future plans
on the OCFS2 Development Roadmap wiki.
http://oss.oracle.com/osswiki/OCFS2/Roadmap

As always, we look forward to hearing from you on the
ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com mailing list.

The OCFS2 Team

OCFS2: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2
TOOLS: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/
FAQ:   http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/dist/documentation/ocfs2_faq.html
GUIDE: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/dist/documentation/ocfs2_users_guide.pdf