SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

The hb_report utility is essential for finding challenges and issues in a SLES HAE Cluster. In a cluster context it is important to capture all log files and all configs of all cluster nodes at the time of an incident to be investigated. For this reason other tools and ways are possible to use, but are not as efficient in a SLES HAE cluster context.

 

For hb_report to work as intended, it should gather all information from all nodes. For this, it is best to setup ssh keys without password to enable the script to traverse the cluster without the Admin giving the root password three to four times, that is,  for each and every node of the cluster.

To setup ssh keys (I use rsa in this example) for this, the command to run as user root is:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

which will create the following two keys in the /root/.ssh/ directory:

id_rsa
id_rsa.pub

 

scp /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@MY_OTHER_SERVER:/tmp/

and on this other server added to the authorized keys:

cat /tmp/id_rsa.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

After this it is possible for root to ssh without password from one server to the other. This should be done for each and every member server of the cluster.

Now hb_report can be used and you may run the hb_report command on the cluster node of your choice, running it only on one node is sufficient, because hb_report will collect all the logs and cluster configurations from all the cluster members.

Assuming there was an incident to investigate on 25.11.2020 09:45, the interesting data would be from this time and from some time above and before. To ensure to capture all information that might have lead to this incident.

So the timeframe in question is from 25.11.2020 08:45 to 25.11.2020 10:45.

And that is the parameters for hb_report:

hb_report -u root -f "2020/11/25 08:45" -t "2020/11/25 10:45" /tmp/hb_report_log

which will then gather all data from all available cluster nodes and create a file named:

/tmp/hb_report_log.tar.bz2

which contains the information that is needed.