> >> I'm planning on deploying a server soon that will be a mirror of my > >> masterhost. Would anyone be willing to provide some details on > >> how they've gone about the process of deploying a server for > >> failover/load balancing?
Keep in mind that there's really no such thing as "masterhosts". There's "policyhosts" and there's systems listed on the RHS of server= blocks in copy: actions (which I call "file servers".) Policyhosts are just file servers that serve up /var/cfengine/inputs via update.conf. > > You have a couple of options. > > > > 1: Use some sort of network appliance to do the load balancing. > > This means you'll have to have the same private key on each host > > or clients will be confused. Also keep in mind that connections > > coming in from the master server to the clients may come from a > > different address then the virtual ip. I think the applicance > > would have to be transparent, otherwise the server will get > > confused as to the clients ppkey. > Are ppkeys hardware dependent? That is, if I have a system failover (move) > to another box (ie. new hardware box, but everything else the same), is it's > ppkey going to be different? The ppkey is just a file--and you certainly don't want it to be different! Restore /var/cfengine (including the policyhost's ppkey) and cfengine will pick up right where it left off. I did that just last week (new OS, but the same hardware.) > I've been thinking about this issue with > respect to moving virtual machines around to different hardware boxes. It seems to me that manual failover of the policyhost would be super easy: - configure the backup-policyhost to get a complete mirror of /var/cfengine/masterfiles. - make the ppkeys on the primary-policyhost and backup-policyhost the same. - when the primary-policyhost dies, renumber the backup-policyhost to the primary-policy (This is a strategy I've successfully used for master/primary name server failover for about 18 years now.) I would think the same idea goes for file servers--except replace /var/cfengine/masterfiles with the source part of all your copy: blocks statements. There's OSS software out there that'll automatically reconfigure a backup host to take over (e.g. change it's IP address) for a primary host when a primary host dies, right? Anybody have recommendations? steve - - - systems & network manager high energy physics university of wisconsin _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
