On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Robert DelGarbino wrote:

> The objective is to have a second server online that will automatically
> take over web hosting if server #1 goes down.
>
> Is there a way to have a back up / redundant web server running in this
> environment?

You could use a combination of Linux Virtual Server
(http://www.linux-vs.org/) and keepalived
(http://keepalived.sourceforge.net/) to load balance your web site between
the two servers.  To the outside world, it looks like you've got one server
with one IP address, but the requests are distributed between the two
servers.  That way you're not "wasting" your backup server during the
99.999% of the time when your primary server is functioning properly.  Also,
if one of the servers does go down, the other just continues to handle all
of the traffic.

There's also heartbeat, which is part of the High-Availability Linux Project
(http://linux-ha.org/).  That should help you do Active-Passive failover if
you decide to go that route.

HTH.

~Jeff
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