Christopher: Did you ever get you 7.6.03 server group to fail over properly? I have a customer that's planning to update their 7.1 ARS server groups, and we're trying to figure out whether 7.5 or 7.6 is best for now.
Thanks! --Phil -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of strauss Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 17:57 To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: DNS entry for Server Group Off-list hints led me to add an "A" record in the Active Directory DNS in my forest for each IP address - the admin server and the member server - for the common server name alias. That name does not need to be added to campus DNS since it is only used by the servers to communicate amongst themselves. Today I started trying to test fail over of things like the mail system or the entire AR system, with no success at all. The mail server on the failover AR server never picks up the work - it remains suspended when the admin server mail service is shut down. It also remains suspended when I shut the entire admin server down, and in fact does not take over as the admin server - it starts crashing the armonitor and ar service constantly, with an ARERR - 90 against its own server name. When I rebooted the member server without the admin server running, the ar monitor crashed a half dozen times complete with a popup faulting error. When I rebooted both of them (after updating the hosts file on each with a pointer to the shortname of the server and the server group alias) they both either pop up application fault errors or crash continuously in the arerror.log or report unavailability of the FTS Plugin. Impressive. Since I have followed the server group configuration docs to the letter in almost every section (did not config Alerts), I am becoming convinced that server groups in 7.6.03 are completely dead on arrival. Depending on which server reboots first, one will constantly crash the arserver.exe, and the other will spit out plugin server errors or FTS plugin errors or both, and errors about not being able to connect to its own local AR Server (the ARERR 90's). There are no apps on this lash-up, just the two AR Servers, and they are behaving so badly today that I'm just going to shut them down. I'll open a ticket to support and give them a shot at the log files before abandoning the entire concept (of server groups). Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of Murnane, Phil Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 4:00 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: DNS entry for Server Group Funny you should mention this Christopher, I just had to do the same thing for a client. It seems the normal configuration is to point all ARS clients (user tool, mid-tier, API, etc) to the load balancer alias name, which is also the name of the server group. The load balancer then does its job and spreads the load among the group member servers. Since each member of the group knows the load balancer alias as itself, it doesn't really matter which server handles any given transaction (speaking generally, in practice there are "sticky" session matters to deal with). So what to do if you're not using a load balancer? We followed the instructions in the AR System guide for managing server groups and then added one additional step of our own -- for each host that will run an ARS client, we manually updated the hosts file to resolve the server group name to one of the group member server's IP address. We estimated the load each client would generate, and tried to balance that load across the member servers. Of course if a client is running on a member server, then it's efficient to have the server group name resolve to 127.0.0.1 (or the equivalent). It's important to note that all clients are configured with server name = group name except for admin class clients, who always have server name = admin server name. HTH, --Phil _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
