[geeks] Remote Failover

Patrick Giagnocavo patrick at zill.net
Tue May 20 11:20:49 CDT 2008


Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> Bill Bradford wrote:

>>
>> DNS round-robin is a really poor way to do failover/balancing, due to TTL
>> and caching.  Why not use Ethernet load balancing, etc (LocalDirector and
>> so forth)?
> 
> Because the machines are a thousand miles apart.  I'm not particularly 
> concerned with balancing, really.  And I can always set the TTL really 
> low for that one record, no?
> 

Yes, but many larger ISPs will cache the DNS record anyways even if they 
are not supposed to.

You might want to look into some other way to get what you want.  Do you 
have enough bandwidth to set up a box using NGINX or Pound (load 
balancing web proxies that can detect when a machine is not responding) 
somewhere, then have it transparently switch between the two?

--Patrick



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