One looming danger when running any replication system is that of node status conflicts. This happens when more than one node has been primary, and we want to reestablish the previous mirror state. This can happen in many ways, but a common scenario can occur if the existing primary node experiences a sudden failure and the remaining secondary node is promoted to primary status.

In the case where we repair the old primary node, we can't simply reattach it to the DRBD network and expect successful synchronization. In cases where the last status for each node is that of a primary, DRBD will not resolve this conflict automatically. It is our job to manually choose the best primary node from our available choices, and reattach the other node.

In this recipe, we'll explore the steps necessary to reattach a malfunctioning node to an existing DRBD architecture. We can't have a highly available PostgreSQL cluster with only one functional node.