On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, Hugh Irvine wrote:
>On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, Jay West wrote:
>> Greetings!
>>
>> Just wanted to confirm my line of thinking on this with others. We want to
>> set up redundant radiator servers for our domain. We want to have a primary
>> and secondary, and NAS's will be told to check aaa in that order. If the
>> primary machine goes down, the secondary will still answer. We will be using
>> mySQL for the user database.
>>
>> My thought was to have two machines, with each machine running both radiator
>> and mySQL. The radiator on the primary will use mySQL on the primary, the
>> radiator on the secondary will use mySQL on the secondary. This should
>> accomplish the above. Then we could set up radiator on the first machine to
>> use mySQL on the second machine (in addition) in case it's own mySQL process
>> fails and vice-versa on the secondary.
>>
>> Several questions:
>>
>> 1) Is this a good recommended configuration or is there something I'm
>> missing or a better way to accomplish high availability? Do we need more
>> machines?
>> 2) In the above config, the primary takes the full load and the secondary
>> only comes into play if the primary is down. In general terms, what changes
>> would need to be made to implement load balancing between the two instead
>> (with one machine taking the full load if the other fails)?
>
>I think my preference would be for four (4) machines. Two Radiator hosts,
>configured as you describe for fallback by the NAS's, and two SQL hosts with
>Radiator configured to switch from one to the other in case of failure. You
>could even run a multi-port RAID box on the back end between the SQL hosts to
>mirror all of your SQL data. From a performance point of view it is a good idea
>to split the Radiator packet processing away from anything else.
>
>Isn't it amazing how much horsepower you can buy these days for not much money?!
If it helps, we are converting our setup to use 2 RADIUS machines, and one
SQL server on a RAID system. This system will hold our session database
as well as our user database. The RADIUS machines are arranged as one
primary, one backup.
I can't think of a good way to load-balance between two machines like
that, that is cheap and easy to do. Most NASes I would think would not be
able to share between two different addresses. The only way you could do
it, is to somehow set the machines up, and have something in between that
intelligently (cleverly in fact) routes the packets, like maybe a Radiator
acting as a proxy. But then you are adding many potential points of
failure, and it's probably not worth the work. After all, the point would
be to have a backup if the primary failed, and the primary in this case
would be your proxy middleman.
Of course you could set up four machines, two proxies (configured
identically) and two real servers. Then the proxies could load balance
somehow, and if one went down you'd have another.
But now we're talking about 4 machines instead of 2....
===========================================================
David M. Lloyd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Administrator
Internet Express, Inc.
802 W. Broadway, Suite 0101
Madison, WI. 53713-1866
Voice: (608) 663-5555 http://www.inxpress.net
Fax: (608) 663-5595 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Data: (608) 663-5551 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===========================================================
===
Archive at http://www.thesite.com.au/~radiator/
To unsubscribe, email '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' with
'unsubscribe radiator' in the body of the message.
