Howdy,
Im looking for a linode friendly way of doing redundacy for both mail and web.

Basicly i want to be able to have 2+ servers that can be used for both mail and web (read apache) access.

Im looking at this from a redunancy perspective incase one box dies or gets rooted or something.

Obviously i would idealy like to have the boxes in different data centres as far away from each other as possible..

My problem is that im not sure of a linode friendly way of doing this.
Tools like linux Heartbeat http://www.linux-ha.org are not going to be possible on a linode.

Load balancing would be a bonus but not a requirement..

I guess one of the big problems with this is going to be the storage medium as i believe all servers would need access to the same datasource. And obviously it would have to be mirroed.. but thats pretty much the extent of my knowledge on the topic,

so im asking the linode community at large, for what everyone else does for redundancy and what else i could investigate!

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ServerAdmin - www.our-lan.com
"Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy whilst looking for a really big stick"
"In my experiece, any attempt to make any system idiot proof will only challenge God to make a better idiot"

just wondering why heartbeat will not work on a linode.

Perhaps you could have 2 front-end Linodes attached to a back-end/storage Linode using the Linode private network capability with a couple of NFS/CIFS shares for your mail and web files in a load-balancing scenario.

An alternative would be to use the Linode failover feature in a similar setup to the load balancing config.

These setups would require that the Linodes be located in the same datacenter, but you could have them located on separate boxes for some physical redundancy.

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moo cow?!?

In Jan 07 when i posted this thread initally, there were a lot of things that linode didnt have then. Xen wasnt in production so there was no way of loading modules.. You couldnt fail over IPS between boxes, there was no private networking between nodes, no joint accounts etc, and the list keeps growing..

Now im glad to say that such a solution would be more then practical and possible.. I just havnt gotten arround to implementing it

Things like DRDB could be used now quite easily to mirror the FS, and yeah.. i think it would be more then doable, and im sure i could do it across my linodes, ive just been lazy as of yet

_________________
ServerAdmin - www.our-lan.com

"Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy whilst looking for a really big stick"

"In my experiece, any attempt to make any system idiot proof will only challenge God to make a better idiot"