[K12OSN] Tossing around an idea...need some input

[Jim Kronebusch]

> >I have been scratching my head over this subject too.
> >
> >My first thought was round robin DNS. Round robin DNS works great for 
> >http, ftp and even mail servers but a quick response from #LTSP informed 
> >me that there is no name resolution at the early stages of the LTSP 
> >client boot sequence.

Here is a wild thought that just dropped into my head.  I don't know much
about scripting so I don't know if this is feasable.  For now it would only
work for two servers as well but maybe this could spawn thoughts for more. 
Lets say you put something like next server option into a little scripting. 
Lets say this script when run would increment some number somewhere by 1 on
every pass.  Then before choosing the next server option and if statement
would run.  The if statement would look at this number somewhere in space and
determine its value odd or even.  Then if the number was odd it would run next
server = 192.168.1.254, else next server = 192.168.1.253.  The thought is more
for load balancing than failover.  This could maybe include more calculations
to decide what to do for more servers, but I am not a enough of a math genius
to figure it out.  You could maybe even set up some external job or script
that runs and monitors a servers status.  If a server is down it could run
some calculation against this number to say always set it to even if server
254 was down.  

Just some thoughts.  I was just thinking that maybe this is such a tough thing
because we are trying to keep all inside the lts.conf file which has limited
capabilities.  

How about a cron that ran a sript even that pinged a server to be sure it was
up, then set a number in a file to the IP of a known stable server.  Then
lts.conf read this file and set a variable of $lts_server to the IP in this
file.  Then next server = $lts_server.  Maybe this file was altered every 30
seconds by the cron?

How about some script in lts.conf that parsed an external file with a list of
server IP's, and randomly grabbed a different one.  Then set the pulled number
as variable $lts_server and still had next server = $lts_server?

I just figured I would throw these out there.  I don't know enough about
everything to know if any of this is feasable, but maybe this will at least
spark other ideas.

Too bad the initial bootup won't handle name resolution, that would most
likely be the easiest way.  Could this be added/implemented?

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