[K12OSN] Curious Question

[Paul Davison]

Matthew Ross wrote:

> Here's a question...
>
> My boss, as much as he loves our LTSP server so far, would love to 
> have a hot-swap backup server as well. Basically, he's wondering if 
> there is a way to have a fault-tollerant setup for an LTSP server.
>
> Since the /home directories will be on a diffrent server alltogether, 
> the user's information would still be there even if our LTSP server 
> crashed.
>
> And I understand that the user's current sessions would fail in the 
> event of a LTSP server failure, but if they rebooted their thin 
> clients, is there a way to have a "backup server" jump in and take over?
>
Hi Matt,

There is no reason you couldn't have a hot-spare LTSP server. There are 
various solutions to that problem with various degrees of difficulty and 
automation. 

You could google for some terms like  High availability, Linux and 
heartbeat to find some info. Also Sysadmin magazine did an article on 
high-availability with redhat 6.2 a while back, the link is  
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1146/sam0109c/0109c.htm

Essentially, most automated solutions have some basic components in 
common.  Two "similar" servers, some form of mirroring between servers, 
some way for the 'slave' to know if the 'master' is offline. A script 
which does the tasks of taking over the 'master' IP and a script which 
keeps the master from re-taking the IP until it has been fixed.

Definitely worth looking into if you have a remote site or require 
high-availability.  The key to most high availability solutions is to 
remove single points of failure (SPOFs).

Hope that helps,

Paul