Why does my STONITH resource not start?

Start (or enable) operation includes checking the status of the device. If the device is not ready, the STONITH resource fails to start. This can happen on the Fabric Management Platform (FMP) if IPMI is not enabled on the platform management console. More information can be found in /var/log/messages.

Can I test to make sure my STONITH device is operational?

Once you set up the Fabric Management Platform (FMP) cluster, you can force a fence of a node by killing the corosync process (crm node fence <nodename>). This should reboot the node. Refer to /var/log/messages for more information.

Why does my STONITH resource fail occasionally?

Power management devices may give up if there is too much broadcast traffic. Space out the monitor operations. Given that fencing is necessary only once in a while (and hopefully never), checking the device status once every few hours is more than enough.

Also, some of these devices may refuse to talk to more than one party at the same time. This may be a problem if you keep a terminal or browser session open while the cluster tries to test the status.