I've got some linodes in Dallas that see a dropped heartbeat packet about once every 1-3 hours. The heartbeat cluster consists of four hosts communicating over the private network. Every few days, i'll see a series of packet drops. In addition, around once a week, DRBD will timeout waiting for a ping acknowledgement and drop it's connection. It only takes 20-30 seconds to reconnect and resync, but I'm afraid that it's going to grow into a larger problem.

I've only ever built clusters on physical networks that I've "owned", which, as you might imagine, don't really see packet loss of any kind. I realize that it's probably going to be more common on a public medium, but I would expect it to be more like periodic congestion instead of consistent like it is. This leads me to believe that it might be more than just the LAN. Is it normal to see such regular intervals of dropped packets?

No. We run many services over our LAN without incident (including all Linode public traffic). Are you running a lot of packets? Please open a support ticket and we'll investigate.

-Chris