I am running a hosting server currently equipped with a backup diesel generator. Since the blackout, I have been considering a backup high availability system, where if one would go out, the other would pick up the slack. I have been told that this is impossible, and can only work if I use a high availability scheme which would always keep one server running. I have been told: "The expensive version of that would be to use the akamai network, you could have both geographical load balancing and near-instant failover. Otherwise, Youd have to build a cluster to start with, there are a lot of ways to do this, and it depends on the service. WWW for example is much easier to do than mail, you can use rsync to keep the content up to date. Logfiles on the other hand would have to be recombined and processed later on to do statistics. Another cheap way to do this would be to set up a bunch of squid servers to proxy traffic to your box. This wouldnt do anything for mail though, to keep that together you'd need some kind of network file system, NFS, AFS or Coda (qmail is NFS aware, which helps). You'd only need to store the user mailboxes (/var/qmail/mailnames) on the network filesystem, Id keep the queue on a local disk for performance reasons. For content, I'd designate one system as the designated "master" for inbound content (ftp, database, etc), and everything else mirrors that (rsync, replication for mysql and postgres, etc). Databases would be the most complex component, you'd have to work out your replication strategy to break out how to do the inserts/updates without each system stepping on each others toes." Does anyone have an idea of how I could offer live (or rsynced to 2 hours) backup/live services for hosting. I would like if one server went down, the other would take over. Is this possible? Sid -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml