Silviu, Your question is very non-trivial, so be prepared to work hard on this or to spend some $s. AOL does not honor short time-to-live requests, so any technique that depends on having rapid DNS changes is doomed to failure. If you don't care about users who connect via AOL, then you can subscribe to one of the dynamic-DNS services and use one of the multiple Linux cluster solutions to manage your failover and update the dynamic-DNS service upon a failure. If you care about AOL users: ===== If you are lucky enough to have portable IP address space, you can run BGP in your routers. (Portable IPs are IPs that can be used with any ISP. Very few people have this, but if you have a class-A or class-B subnet of your own, then you do.) The router will recognize the failure and move all the traffic to the remaining connection. Another choice is to get multiple connections from the same ISP. i.e. One from POP A, and one from POP B. Then you should be able to get that ISP to let you run BGP in your router and control which circuit you are using. BGP does load-balancing as well as failover so you get to use both circuits in both of the above. Otherwise, I recommend you find a quality co-location facility you can trust and that rent some space there. Many co-location facilities have multiple outside feeds and have their own portable IP space. That means that they handle the ISP failover situation for you. You just have to worry about keeping your servers running. Again, there are several Linux cluster solutions that can help with this. I think heartbeat and failsafe will both work in this case, and I think both are included with SuSE. FYI: I have a colleague that has worked with several ISPs in Eastern Europe if you need a recommendation for a good co-location facility. All the ones I have used are in the US. Greg Freemyer
Given two web-servers that will be connected to the internet through different providers, how can I implement, in an elegant fashion a failover solution? Load-balancing is not necessary, just failover; the user that types www.whatever.com in the web-browser _must_ get served in case one of the servers failed or a provider's link is down.
I know that there is plenty of information about this, but I'm asking for some directions, from someone who did this, in order to spend less time searching through non-relevant documentation.
Thank you.
-- Silviu Marin-Caea Systems Engineer Linux/Unix http://www.genesys.ro Phone +4093-267961
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