Mailing List Archive

single point of failure in a highly available cluster of web servers.
On Tuesday, Mar 18, 2003, at 16:44 US/Eastern, Rama K. McIntosh wrote:
> I am trying to eliminate a single point of failure outlined below (I
> am new to Wackamole so please forgive me if I am missing the basics).
>
> My concern is Wackamole seems to be aware of computer servers crashing
> but not the web server crashing. Is there anyway to have Wackamole
> take over the IP of a server if httpd crashes, not the machine itself.
>
> For example I have two backhanded servers with Wackamole to service a
> virtual IP. If machine A has the IP and it crashes, the Wackamole
> will have Machine B take over. However, if httpd on Machine A
> crashes while Machine A is still running fine, my web farm is now dead
> even though Machine B is functioning fine.
>
> Is there any way to eliminate this single point of failure?

There is a program distributed with wackamole called wacktrl. It
allows you to fail a machine administratively.

So, right a service tester (in perl or whatever) and if the service
tester comes back with a negative on machine A, have it run wackatrl -f
and when it starts working again have it run wackatrl -s.

--
Theo Schlossnagle
Principal Consultant
OmniTI Computer Consulting, Inc. -- http://www.omniti.com/
Phone: +1 410 872 4910 x201 Fax: +1 410 872 4911
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