Re: Failover

[Tom Brown <tom@thebrownboys.net>]

On Monday 21 February 2005 11:57, Curtis Vaughan wrote:
> Has anyone set up failover scripts on a debian box?
>
> I'm looking at linux-ha.org and in particular
> http://failover.othello.ch/ but there is no debian specific package.
> Of course, there is a source package, but I would be surprised if no
> one in the debian community has looked into this before.
>
> Let me explain what I want to do.
> We want to have a failover mail server.
> As I understand it should be fairly easy to do the following:
> 1. Have the primary server rsync over any new info to the failover
> server immediately.
> 2. Have the failover server monitor the primary server. In the even
> the primary is unavailable the failover takes the IP address of the
> primary and becomes the primary. When the primary comes back on, it
> detects that the failover is now the primary and the former primary
> now becomes the failover.
>
> That's basically it.
>
> Curtis

What you describe is what drbd and heartbeat do. I implemented both on a 
couple of Debian Woody servers and they work out great. I would 
recommend getting the latest source and not the debian packages.

Hope this helps,
Tom