At 4/8/01 11:49 PM -0400, you wrote:
> If I intend to load-balance two cobalts, how do I ensure that > data passed-in > from users are written to both servers ? This is especially so when users > make changes to their emails, perform backups, administer their > sites online > and even FTP. > It sounds like you're talking about RAID, that I believe is available.
Nah... RAID is for speed and/or fault-tolerance on disks within one server. What this guy wants (and what I want) is more like failover, where you have a standby machine that takes over instantly if the first fails, or clustering, where you have two machines that are essentially full mirrors of each other: they share the load (providing much more power) and if one fails the other keeps going.
Obviously clustering is better, since it also allows you to add machines so that eventually you have N servers providing both load-balancing and fault-tolerance.
Cobalt provides a failover solution in its StaQware application. Of course, then you only have failover, and no load-balancing so that's an expensive solution.
There have also been some mentions, although I haven't seen anyone say they're using it, of rsync: http://rsync.samba.org/rsync/features.html
I'm now using rsync to mirror the Linux Documentation Project and to create a mirror of the RedHat FTP site. Eventually (next 2-3 months) I'll be using it to make a backup of my server; I'll post details then, but I can say now that rsync is a very easy tool to use and comes highly recommended.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx