[LON-CAPA-admin] Adding Access servers

[lucasm at ohiou.edu]

Do you still want me to check this out? From what I heard, our method may 
actually be defunct in newer versions of DNS.

Mark
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, H. K. Ng wrote:

> Mark,
> 
> Do you know how your network staff enters the round-robin registration? If 
> you could get that info, it would helpful to me. When I asked the folks 
> here to do it - it works to some extend - it doesn't actually do a 
> round-robin. It still takes the first entry almost every time. However, if 
> that one is down or not available?, it goes to the next one.
> 
> Thanks,
> -hk
> 
> At 04:19 PM 3/30/2005, you wrote:
> >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.
> >
> >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?
> >2) Should we then give our access servers the same, or different, LON-CAPA
> >names?
> >3) Or is there some other way to manifest the load-balancing that I should
> >point our network folks to?
> >
> >Thanks for your help.  I'm learning more about the inner workings of
> >load-balancing than I ever thought I would, but that's a "good thing".
> >
> >
> >Todd
> >
> > > > We have defined an alias, loncapa.phy.ohiou.edu, that has two references
> > > > in the Domain Name server. DNS hands out the name in a round-robin
> > > > fashion. This does a pretty good job of evening the load. Once the 
> > student
> > > > is logged into a particular server, they stay on that server.
> >
> >
> >
> >--
> >Dr. Todd Ruskell
> >Lecturer, Department of Physics              Office:  Meyer Hall 326
> >Colorado School of Mines                     Phone: 303-384-2080
> >1523 Illinois Street                         Fax: 303-273-3919
> >Golden, CO 80401
> >_______________________________________________
> >LON-CAPA-admin mailing list
> >LON-CAPA-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
> >http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-admin
> 
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Lucas					email: lucasm at ohiou.edu
252D Clippinger Lab  				phone: (740)597-2984
Department of Physics and Astronomy             fax:   (740)593-0433
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701