Short history... I was a Windows Network consultant for years, UNTIL I found www.ScubaBoard.com. Now that has become my primary source of income (yay). Unfortunately, I have never quite made it all the way through the learning curve to be fully comfortable in my CentOS 5.2 environment. I really feel compelled to grasp the technology that my vBulletin based forum is running on.

I get yum... I love yum. Yum is simply my best friend. Simple, complete and it just works! Yay yum!

I don't get rpm. Not a lick. Now add compiling to it, and I simply shake my head in weariness. I have asked some friends who are Linux gurus, and they simply laugh, assure me that I will get it through some quick hints at me and leave me to figure it out. What's a noob to do? I clearly remember my first defeat at understanding Linux (though it was actuall FreeBSD). My sysadmin hated that I did not understand the OS and was trying to force me to learn. His less than eloquent "Es you to root you moron!" will always be etched in my brain. I had no idea he actually emant to type "su", hit enter and then type in the root password!

So HOW do I get past this next hurdle of understanding? Is there a wonderfully crafted treatise on this? My next project is simple (I think). I want to install ultra monkey on a 32 bit Dell server with CentOS 5.2 already installed.

I found this: http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/installation-rh.el.3.html but I am at a loss as to how to proceed. Any hints on how to get going?

RPM How To's
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/rpminstall.html
http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/
Source pkg How To
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/softinstall.html

I would say not to go with ultramonkey, only because it looks not maintained. But if you're going CentOS, look here for LVS front end.

My advice to you is to install/break/fix/learn CentOS in a non critical server or virtual machine and become more comfortable before you tackle something like IP load balancing in Linux. Maybe install in a virtual machine and snapshot a known good config, then do everything you want without too much fear of breaking, since you have a snapshot to revert to.

You can probably start with this on the directors:
and this on the real servers
After that, you should be able to follow the instructions here although I'm not at all familar with ultra monkey.

HTH

Forrest

WAY excellent. Thanks! I will check them out now. LVS??? I need to run multiple servers with the same virtual IP to the world. It's running now on leased servers and I am moving to a cabinet with my own servers. Tru dat! This is on a development server to evaluate the performance and to test my mettle. It's single final function will be as a load balancer for three web servers which will feed into a single db server.

LVS intro

Ultramonkey is based on LVS