Hi all. I'm trying to work out what is the easiest way to provide a fail-over for printing services here; All our network printers talk lpd but the desktops are MSWindows98. Currently I have a box running Linux / samba to act as a protocol convertor, however it is a single point of failure on the network.
My initial thoughts were: 1) add a second box on a different IP / netbios name and configure this as a second printer 2) as 1 but configure the desktop to use a different printer thereby solving the problem where a printer fails. The downside is that both these require some user intervention when the printer fails. As an alternative, I then considered having a hot standby which was a 'clone' of the main box. The idea was that this box would assume the netbios identity of the main box if it detected a loss of service. The problem is that it would take some time for the desktops to realise that the printserver had a new IP address / MAC address. Anybody any ideas? At one time there was a document in circulation called the HA Howto (high availability) but I can't seem to find a copy anywhere. Anybody got any good URLs? cheers, Colin -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
