Hello Ed, I am most interested in the scenario you are talking about, so I will follow this thread anxiously, and will be very glad in anybody shines some lite on it, and gives any ideas :)
Regards, Jonas Andradas On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 8:26 PM, Ed W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK, how feasible is it to rent some commodity servers from the likes of > a cheapo host like 1and1 and turn them into something robust? > > Right now I have had some success taking a rented box and using vservers > to run multiple virtual machines. It's then easy to add new physical > servers and shunt services around. However, we had the hardware lockup > on one machine recently and suddenly everything on that machine becomes > unavailable... So now I'm trying to figure out how to make this system > robust against hardware failure as well. > > Apps are a mailserver (Dovecot+Postfix) and a custom Rails webapp > (currently under Apache, but considering alternatives). > > Clearly it's a piece of cake to build two identical mail/webservers, the > bits I am not quite understanding are: > > 1) How to load balance to my hypothetical backend of 3 (or so) identical > machines? (remember I am using some rented boxes so I can't shift IP > addresses around and have just 100mbit ethernet between everything) > 2) How to create reliable persistant storage for the mail and webservers? > > Assuming only the rented boxes described (as many as you like!), is it > possible to do better than simply playing DNS tricks to keep > availability if backend machines go down? (ie solve (1) above). Seems > like I can either use simple dns round robin to the backend servers if > thats all I need, or I can fit two loadbalancer machines (or some > description) in front if I need better balancing - however, one way or > another I'm back to the situation that the loadbalancer hardware could > go bad? > > There is conflicting advice on best practice to solve 2) above. Given > only a single net connection to each of the machines, split brain type > problems seem like a normal situation? However, this particular host > provides a net based serial console and also a net based method to > forceably reboot the machine (or take it down), however the later is not > instant and may take some fiddling to automate usage of these features. > Also the limitation is still that net interface... What happens when > someone blows up an internal router and the network becomes subtly > internally broken? > > What would be best for this situation to run reliable mysql + mail > storage + webserver storage? Gluster? DRBD + OCFS ?? Something else? > (Pay through the nose for a san...?) > > Grateful for some pointers to get started here? > > Ed W > > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-HA mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.linux-ha.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-ha > See also: http://linux-ha.org/ReportingProblems > -- Jonás Andradas Skype: jontux LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/andradas GPG Fingerprint: 5A90 3319 48BC E0DC 17D9 130B B5E2 9AFD 7649 30D5 Keyservers: wwwkeys.pgp.net | pgp.rediris.es
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