winscape 2373

Morten Reistad

I've got 2 and 3. The programmers need to be more helpful with 1. Sometimes the load distribution gets tricky when there's n boxes running and one dies and you need to shed the load from one to the farm.

issue since y is possibly at a capacity level that makes having 2x the load an issue.

Making failover transparent and redistributing users across a number of machines right now is my present issue at work. Seems the app that loadbalances the users needs to have the intelligence to reposition them across the array of machines when the primary goes down.

All the Sun and Intel machines I've got have redundant networking under Linux with two big honking Cisco switches hooked up on redundant power feeds. The Intel iANS network layer does a pretty solid job of moving the network address for the box transparently.

The Suns all have network failover... so the network IP part is easy.

Kickstart and jumpstart will rebuild a box remotely via network boot and install.

We've even built and setup the data center stuff for our application remotely coming in internationally over a modem and having the customer insert CD's so we could build the install server and then went from that box out to setup the networking interfaces, firewalls and routers.

Reminded me of operators hanging tapes.

People are surprised we could do it all remotely. They've forgotten the command line and all thing GUI access.

The problem is the more boxes you have the more administrator effort in making it look like the service is coming from one place -- load balancer configs get tricky... security is more involved... The more boxes the more sysadmin needed to make it work.

Bill -- digital had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-ureach.com