Has anyone gotten a raq4i and use 2 isp's (1 for each of the built in nics)with 2 static ip's and use round robin to load balance?? I am looking to do this whith a box and was just woundering if thiis is doable?

Thanks
Enrique

What good does load balancing do you if you're hammering the same CPU and RAM for the content? Load balancing is meant to spread the load over multiple boxes, not multiple NICs in one box.

If you _were_ going to do what you propose, though, you'd just have to create a virtual site for each IP address and mirror the desired content between the two sites. Ensure proper DNS records exist for each vsite, and that's all there is to it.

Maybe he wants to put DNS somewhere else and then point round robin to each ip? If you had a short ttl set at the DNS (or used something like zoneedit), this would probably be a decent pseudo-redundancy if you were hosting from home on two dsl lines or something like that. Just a guess.

Originally posted by bjseiler
Maybe he wants to put DNS somewhere else and then point round robin to each ip? If you had a short ttl set at the DNS (or used something like zoneedit), this would probably be a decent pseudo-redundancy if you were hosting from home on two dsl lines or something like that. Just a guess.

Correct... I should have put in more info. I have 3 lines coming in to my home at this time.

Covad business DSL (1.2megabit)
Business class Wireless (2megabit)
Comcast home cable (home pc's use only).

I have 2 Raq4's (about 110 vsites total), 1 raq4i and a proliant compaq server running win2k (only used for streaming real audio via the wireless line).

The plan is to give the raq4i a failover if DSL was to go down the wireless would take it over. I was reading stuff about Cisco local-director but thought that there was a way to set it up without having to buy more equipment. If this worked I was going to migrate all the accounts from the regular raq4's to the raq4i.

If buying a local-director will let me keep the same regular raq4 boxes with a single nic then I might just want to go that route.

Thank you guys for your input

Enrique

Originally posted by BruceT

If you _were_ going to do what you propose, though, you'd just have to create a virtual site for each IP address and mirror the desired content between the two sites. Ensure proper DNS records exist for each vsite, and that's all there is to it.

Is there a way to do the above but use the same Vsite for both ip's? I have a forum that would complicate creating 2 vsites. The reason behind all this is really failover not really mass traffic.

Thanks guys
Enrique

You can setup virtual interfaces for the network card that would allow you to do that. Its the exact same as adding a second or third ip to the server. If you did that would have to make sure the routing table does not get messed up.

As long as the domains are named based and not ip it will work fine.

Originally posted by EO|webhost
You can setup virtual interfaces for the network card that would allow you to do that. Its the exact same as adding a second or third ip to the server. If you did that would have to make sure the routing table does not get messed up.

As long as the domains are named based and not ip it will work fine.

Is this in the Gui ? 1'st time doing this. I always just used a single ip per server till I got this 4i raq. :eek:

If this was me all I would do is create 2 different virtual sites

www.domain.com
www.address.com

I would then login via the shell and go to

cd /home/sites/
ls you will see a listing of sites...

The GUI makes a new folder called site# you lets just say
www.domain.com is site10
www.address.com is site11

What we are going to do is make a symbolic link (exactly like the cobalt gui does with the domain's in this folder). Remove the web content folder site10 then make a link from the web content folder on site11 to site10.

cd into one of the domains (site10)
rm -R web everything is not gone
ln -s ../site10/web web What you are doing is making a link from the /web folder on domain.com (site10) to address.com (site11).

Now you just tricked the RaQ into thinking that you have 2 different site with 2 sets of users and even 2 bandwidth controls if necessary. In reality all the web content is controlled by site11's users.

If I screwed with with a command here tell me, I did it on my RaQ as I was typing since I normally use BSD Unix sometimes the commands are slightly different and I get confused.

I think this is the best solutions because you will perserve the GUI and get the ablity to tap 2 different connections.

-------------------

Now you wanted to load balance the one site on 2 connections? Well because the RaQ w/o editing the Apache config file you can't have multiple ip's for one domain you COULD do the following

www.domain.com - 1.1.1.1 <-- Wireless
www2.domain.com - 2.2.2.2 <-- DSL

Then in your DNS you would have a round robbin www.domain.com 1.1.1.1 with a low TTL, also www.domain.com 2.2.2.2 also low TTL. Apache loads listes based on the order in in the config file. So if www2 is added to your virtual sites list and it is the first domain on that ip, then that site will be the default site when someone tries to connect to http://2.2.2.2 for example.

So normally your wireless is running www (1.1.1.1) if it were to go down, your DNS server would handout the second ip www (2.2.2.2) but because you can't have 2 site with the same domain.host BUT you have www2 which is a mirror of the www, when your browser requests www (2.2.2.2)...www2 the default site will be loaded.

The problem with this is your doing a round robbin load balance, its technically a hack to the DNS system. It is common but you will still have DNS servers getting 1.1.1.1 as the ip for www eventhough it is down. There are good DNS server out there that can do real load-balancing such as QuickDNS from Men and Mice (http://menandmice.com/).

I hope this all makes since I know it works but I may not be that clear. PM me if you want some help! I am sure other people have other ideas but this is waht I would do.

Thanks
Brian

thanks existenz

I'll give it a try. :D

interesting fact:
(well it might not be that interesting to the male population of this website, which i assume is a large percentage. if you are easily grossed out, skip this post.)

okay, the fact:
"round robin" is the official (i'm pretty sure, if not, its a slang term) for a type of catheter that doctors and nurses stick up a certain body part in order to empty the bladder if you are unable to urinate. i had a urinary tract infection a few weeks ago and this round robin is about the diameter of a drinking straw and its about 18 inches long. the experience was excrucating and definately not fun. :(

my mother is a doctor and warned me about the procedure beforehand. scared the **** out of me.

(edited to fix a spelling mistake. gotta love these 90+ hour work weeks working for the u.s. military.)