Multihomed server for backup & load balancing

Kevin Darcy kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Thu Feb 15 21:56:30 UTC 2001


I think you'll find that *most* clients will eventually fail over, but
the failover timeout will vary from client platform to client platform.
Of course, if a client is lucky enough to get the live address first in
the address list, then there's not timeout at all.

One huge advantage of something like Local Director or BGP4 (I assume
that's what you meant; I've never heard of "MGP4") is that they eliminate
the timeout completely. Also, the higher-end products allow you present a
whole farm of servers as a single address and to dynamically shift the
traffic between them as load conditions change. They are therefore a much
more elegant solution than plain old DNS "round-robin", although often
very expensive...


- Kevin
PostDemon at sharkoverboard.com wrote:

> One web server
> Redhat 6.2
> Bind 8.2.3
> Two network cards from seperate ISP's for redundancy.
>
> I have placed IN A entries in BIND for the two NICS agains our web
> site and that works.  My questions is are the clients and DNS servers
> out there going to be smart enough to serve out the live IP address if
> one of them goes down.  What I have read looks to be agains this as
> well as what I have tried.
>
> I have looked at isc.org and a software solution does not present
> itself.  I have seen mention of Cisco Local Director and MGP4 for load
> balancing and redundancy.
>
> I want to know if this can be done with software?  ie: DNS, routing
> tables.





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