STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head)

STONITH

STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) is a Linux service for maintaining the integrity of nodes in a high-availability (HA) cluster. STONITH automatically powers down a node that is not working correctly. An administrator might employ STONITH if one of the nodes in a cluster can not be reached by the other node(s) in the cluster. STONITH is traditionally implemented by hardware solutions that allow a cluster to talk to a physical server without involving the operating system (OS). Although hardware-based STONITH works well, this approach requires specific hardware to be installed in each server, which can make the nodes more expensive and result in hardware vendor lock-in. A disk-based solution, such as split brain detection (SBD), can be easier to implement because this approach requires no specific hardware.