Hello Everyone,

I have 2 web servers both running Fedora 7. One is active and the other is backup. Using RSYNC I copy all of the website files from the active server to the backup server.

However, my company is experiencing an increase in growth rate and I need something that is better then just a simple copy.

I would like to cluster the 2 servers and have load balancing and system failure. That way if one server goes down the remaining one will take on the load until I can get the other back up and running. Right now, I have no immediate solution and the site could be down for 30 min to an hour before I get the backup server updated and configured correctly.

If anyone knows of any tutorials or software options to help me set this up I would appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

I had written about using GFS before but not only is it a bit complicated to configure, it's overkill for your needs. What you should look at is involving 2 more machines to your architecture.

The first should have LVS on it (free load-balancing software for Linux) to distribute traffic among your 2 web servers and provide redundancy.

The second should just be an NFS enabled machine on which your web directory is shared by both your web servers.

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the reply.

Have you had any experience with the Redhat cluster suite? That looks like a viable option. Im not sure on the redundancy though, would I have to keep using RYSNC and MySQL replication?

Remember, backup & high-availability are 2 different concepts. A cluster is an HA soln, you still need off-line (pref off-site) backups eg rsync + tape or go for the full blown Amanda and backup all your systems..

I do backup to tape and to off site storage. I was wondering how the redundancy worked with a cluster though. I havent found much information on that. Does it utilize RSYNC and MySQL replication, so if one server does go down the other can take over?

Well, MySQL does its own clustering. iirc, you need 5.1 to get disk backed cluster. The 5.0 version was RAM based, although it did work.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...l-cluster.html