Installing Keepalived¶

Install keepalived from the distribution’s repositories or, alternatively, compile from source. Although installing from the repositories is generally the fastest way to get keepalived running on a system, the version of keepalived available in the repositories are typically a few releases behind the latest available stable version.

Installing from the Repositories¶

Installing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux¶

As of Red Hat 6.4, Red Hat and the clones have included the keepalived package in the base repository. Therefore, run the following to install the keepalived package and all the required dependencies using YUM:

yum install keepalived

Installing on Debian¶

Run the following to install the keepalived package and all the required dependencies using Debian’s APT package handling utility:

apt-get install keepalived

Compiling and Building from Source¶

In order to run the latest stable version, compile keepalived from source. Compiling keepalived requires a compiler, OpenSSL and the Netlink Library. You may optionally install Net-SNMP, which is required for SNMP support.

Install Prerequisites on RHEL/CentOS¶

On RHEL, install the following prerequisites:

yum install curl gcc openssl-devel libnl3-devel net-snmp-devel

Install Prerequisites on Debian¶

On Debian, install the following prerequisites:

apt-get install curl gcc libssl-dev libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev libsnmp-dev

Build and Install¶

Use curl or any other transfer tool such as wget to download keepalived. The software is available at http://www.keepalived.org/download.html or https://github.com/acassen/keepalived. Then, compile the package:

curl --progress http://keepalived.org/software/keepalived-1.2.15.tar.gz | tar xz
cd keepalived-1.2.15
./configure
make
sudo make install

It is a general recommendation when compiling from source to specify a PREFIX. For example:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/keepalived-1.2.15

This makes it easy to uninstall a compiled version of keepalived simply by deleting the parent directory. Additionally, this method of installation allows for multiple versions of Keepalived installed without overwriting each other. Use a symlink to point to the desired version. For example, your directory layout could look like this:

[root@lvs1 ~]# cd /usr/local
[root@lvs1 local]# ls -l
total 12
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root   17 Feb 24 20:23 keepalived -> keepalived-1.2.15
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Feb 24 20:22 keepalived-1.2.13
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Feb 24 20:22 keepalived-1.2.14
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Feb 24 20:22 keepalived-1.2.15

Setup Init Scripts¶

After compiling, create an init script in order to control the keepalived daemon.

On RHEL:

ln -s /etc/rc.d/init.d/keepalived.init /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S99keepalived

On Debian:

ln -s /etc/init.d/keepalived.init /etc/rc2.d/S99keepalived

Note: The link should be added in your default run level directory.