[clug] how best to do a backup web server

[Tony and Robyn Lewis]

Michael Still wrote:

> Ummm. I got this email four times. No matter.


Might have clicked Send too hard.  Sorry.

>
> A traditional way of doing this would be to have the DNS server do 
> some sort of geographical / load balanced / failover mapping of the 
> machines with a very short TTL.


This is my thought, too.  If anyone has experience of this, I'll listen 
to your stories.

> Another way would be to have a frontend machine cluster (think a pair 
> of load balancers) balance traffic to the two hosting machines. A poor 
> man's implementation could be achieved with iptables.


I don't see this working for geographical disparity (i.e. the second 
server in another data centre).  For one, whichever machine runs the 
iptables wizardry is still a significant single point of failure.  For 
another, clustering under such circumstances is probably not going to 
work.  I'd *like* to use clustering, and would love to be corrected.

Tony