I asked yesterday if it was possible to do a virtual IP setup without
the systems involved being a cluster.
I got many responses suggesting a simple round-robin dns. While this
would distribute the load across the machines, it fails to provide the
reliability desired. When doing maintenance etc, the system must be
removed from the DNS - not that I don't have control of the DNS, it's
just an extra step. Also, if a system should fail unexpectedly, roughly
half of the connections would fail.
Others suggested putting a linux box in front of them and running
a software load balancing package on that - of course that just moves
the point of failure. Not that I don't trust linux (I have boxes that
have rolled over the uptime counter - 497 days on x86), but i'd rather
not increase the number of systems in the stream at this point.
I really like the cluster aliases design - maybe somebody from compaq
can suggest that it be integrated into the base, or at least for
non-cluster systems in the future. I'm open to other ideas if people have
them. If somebody sends me something good, I'll post a further summary -
for now this is it.
thanks,
Charles Ballowe /"\
Unix System Administrator \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
cballowe_at_usg.com X Against HTML Mail
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Received on Thu Jul 11 2002 - 15:22:47 NZST