[sclug] Mirror disks across machines like distributed RAID?

[Dickon Hood]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 16:52:40 +0000, Tom Carbert-Allen wrote:
: On 06/01/2010 4:18, Dickon Hood wrote:
: >HA webservers can usually be managed happily with the usual tricks:
: >clusters of machines, load balancers (if you insist), HSRP-alike failover,
: >virtual IP addresses and whatnot.  Or you can simply do what the BBC has
: >done for many years, and have a five-minute TTL on the DNS and ifconfig an
: >alias on another machine should one of the farm go down.  This sort of
: >thing isn't rocket science.

: I am very surprised the BBC are using such a manual technique to keep 
: there site online, especially as you seem to suggest a human is logging 
: in and performing this operation.

There's a trick: buy decent hardware that doesn't fall over every couple
of minutes, and run a solid OS on it.  Hence Solaris on Sun kit, rather
than Windows on Dell.

: Then again there site is static, 

mod_include, mostly.

: doesn't require transactions or a users session to stay open 
: transparently during a fail over, so simple old technology would be 
: enough for them. Maybe they aren't as hi tech as they would have us believe.

High tech !=> better.  Sometimes simple is best.

-- 
Dickon Hood

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