Another important task of Heartbeat is that it manages the Resources of the cluster. A resource can be anything that is available on a node of the cluster and is relevant to the service it provides: it can be an IP address (for example, the Service IP of a fail-over cluster), a software running on the nodes (for example, PNS), and so on. Actually these resources are what is taken over when a node fails. Heartbeat manages the resources through resource scripts — regular shell script files that can start and stop the resource on the node (for example, bring an interface into up/down state), and can return status information about the resource (for example, indicate whether the interface is in up or down state). How to configure heartbeat resources is described in Procedure 12.5.4, Configuring Heartbeat resources.