Web Server Fault Tolerance/Load Sharing

[Peter C. Gorman]

At 3:52 PM -0500 4/14/99, Donna Schumann wrote:
>What do you need to set up a "backup" web server to automatically take
>over if the primary web server fails?

We keep a hot spare server running 24x7. Every night it is updated to
contain a complete mirror of the production server. At first, we would
switch the hostname from the production to the backup machine in DNS
whenever an outage occurred. This took several minutes to propagate, so
instead we now run a script to move the production IP address to the backup
machine. This takes seconds, and we have moved from production to backup
(and back again) without users ever noticing the change. These are IBM
RS/6000s running Apache under AIX.

PG
_______________________________
Peter C. Gorman
Automation Librarian
University of Wisconsin-Madison
General Library System
Library Technology Group
pcgorman at facstaff.wisc.edu
(608) 265-5291