--- SNIP --- Hi Stefan, okay you win :-) (comments inline)
Be carefull with DNS doing the round robin - not every dns resolver can handle more than one ip-address for one name. E.g. Windows 9x/ME strips off all additional ip-addresses. It only uses the first ip-address it gets. Then there is such a thing called name cache. All resolved hosts are stored within this cache for performance reasons. If such a "bad" net-member (using just the first ip of an answer-section and storing this ip into the local resolver-cache) tries to access the "server-in-service", it will get an error like that: "timeout. could not access resource due to connection timeout."
I'd rather think this is a server issue, not one of the clients ... if you dig for www.ibm.com, for example, there are at least 4 adresses given as answer. If you dig again, they shift. I find windows2000 server with its DNS service to fail with round robin as well ... But normally if a client cannot resolve the first time it tries again (at least 3 times) so what's the problem ?
I do this at two sites with very good success and I am able to do maintenance on that systems, while everybody keeps on working, without them even noticing my reboots ;-)
Same with heartbeat - and you don't have to wait for your ISP to enter another address for the same name ;o)
Okay, IP takeover is a fine thing, but you need additional software and cannot share the load (ok, you can do active/active clusters, but this needs shared disks and so on ...).
Regards, Philipp Rusch
regards, Stefan
We are getting more and more OT, so lets end with diplomacy: there is more than one way ... Regards, Philipp