how to know when a server dropped the ball

nephish · 08-31-2005, 07:33 AM

Greetings.
i have two almost identical debian servers set up at work. Both on an internal LAN. A main one and a backup. The router forwards port 80 to one of them, but i was wondering if there was a way for the backup computer to know if the main one crashes so it can take over as the main server. i would have to write a script or something that would change its ip address to be the one that the router is forwarding port 80 to . Or is there a better way to do this?
open for suggestions.
thanks

acid_kewpie · 09-01-2005, 05:40 AM

There are very proper ways to do this, using LVS (Linux Virtual Servers) normally. To be honest I've never even touched this stuff, but as you're only after a failover rather than real load balancing, a pretty simple implementation should be fine. Here's a couple of links that, if not provide you with anend product you like, should give you lots of documentation about the gerneal subject.

http://www.linux-ha.org/HomePage
http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/

acid_kewpie · 09-01-2005, 05:43 AM

actually, maybe this is all you need... http://sourceforge.net/projects/vrrpd/

nephish · 09-01-2005, 07:40 AM

Cool, i still need to look into it more, but i think i am going to go with Ultra Monkey 3.
We dont really need load balancing right now, but likely we will in the next few months.
Also, there is a package for debian Sarge. (what both of the servers run).
very cool indeed. And thanks for the tip.