[LON-CAPA-admin] Adding Access servers

[Guy Albertelli II]

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> Mark (and likely Guy),
> 
> Thanks for the solution below.  I took Mark's implementation to our network 
> folks, and got this positive response with a caveat:
> 
> > We can and will support the round-robin scheme for resolving IP 
> > addresses.  I should say I've never done it, so I'm not sure exactly 
> > what all the possible gotchas are, but it's pretty standard practice and 
> > should work.
> > 
> > We can't however accomplish this the way you describe.  The feature 
> > (actually it was considered a bug) that allowed an alias to point to 
> > multiple systems ad described in the quote you sent was removed/fixed in 
> > recent version of BIND.
> > 
> > The approved method of achieving the same result is to have multiple 
> > hosts that actually have the same hostname.  That is we could have two 
> > hosts defined with the name "loncapa.mines.edu", each with different IP 
> > addresses.
> 

Some of these answers change in 2.0.

> So this brings me to questions probably for Guy:  
> 
> The hosts.tab file contains hostnames, LON-CAPA names, and IP addresses.  
> 1) Will LON-CAPA choke if two IP addresses have the hostnames?  

yes.

> 2) Should we then give our access servers the same, or different, LON-CAPA 
> names?  

access servers have to be completely unique. different IP, hostname,
loncapaname

> 3) Or is there some other way to manifest the load-balancing that I should 
> point our network folks to?

Hrrm, not that I am aware of
We do this here:

$ host msu.loncapa.org
msu.loncapa.org has address 35.9.119.101
msu.loncapa.org has address 35.9.119.102
...
$ host 35.9.119.101
101.119.9.35.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer s1.lite.msu.edu.
$ host s1.lite.msu.edu
s1.lite.msu.edu has address 35.9.119.101

Lon-CAPA expects this.

guy at albertelli.com  LON-CAPA Developer  0-7-2-9-