Koozali.org: home of the SME Server

Legacy Forums => Experienced User Forum => Topic started by: Tyrone Miles on December 19, 2002, 03:46:14 AM

Title: Load Balancing
Post by: Tyrone Miles on December 19, 2002, 03:46:14 AM

Does anyone know anything about DNS Load Balancing?

I have 2 e-smith 5.5 servers in 2 locations (One in my house and one at my mother’s house on the other side of town)

I took a ghost of my main server (The one at my house) and then installed that on another PC that is the same set up (That works great)  

So now I have 2 identical servers. (Besides having to change the IP on the second server)

Now what I want to do is have my main server be my primary e-mail and web server and the other server to be my backup server in case my primary server goes down. Also I have my DNS equally splitting traffic between my web servers so I want to make sure both servers have the exact same web data 98% of the time or more.

What I want to be able to do is if my primary server goes down and my back up server collects e-mail and users make changes to their websites etc (Or I add users etc) I want to be able to sync them up when I bring the primary server back on-line. (Without having to manually do it?)

I have looked over the rsync RPM below. But I am not sure it fits what I need. Help. :)

http://www.dungog.net/sme/products/backup.php

Title: Re: Load Balancing
Post by: schotty on December 19, 2002, 04:44:45 PM

Hello!

Part of this is easy enough actually. With DNS it is possible to make a MX record (mail server) and also a secondary MX record.

Set the first record to use your main server and the secondary set to the 2 server.
When somebody tries to send you a mail then the mx record for your domain will be given. If your first server doesnt respond and the second server does then your second server will indeed recieve the mail.

Not sure about getting all the mails transfered to the first server though, but that would be a good corporate feature when a comany has more servers.......

Ideas anyone??

Title: Re: Load Balancing
Post by: David Woolley on December 23, 2002, 09:37:40 AM

As well as Rsync, check out Unison which does bi-directional mirroring of i-bays scheduled via the server-manager.  I use it for offsite backup as you describe.

There are plenty of Unison threads on this forum to search.

David