> From: John Stoffel [mailto:[email protected]] > > Edward> Better yet, some form of high availability. The ability to > Edward> have multiple machines all providing the same services. Take > Edward> one down for service, and when it's back up again, take the > Edward> other down for service. > > I'd love to be able to rollout some sort of high availability setup > for my engineer's VNC sessions, so that I could move their sessions > and reboot the VNC servers, etc. > > I don't think I can do this, because of NFS mount points that user's > get into and which need updating, etc. It's *really* hard from what I > can see to make a robust system where I don't have to reboot once in a > while.
What I personally do for my users is to designate one system as the VNC / X11 forwarding / NX / RDP server. Whenever users open up a GUI terminal on that machine, they're automatically prompted to connect to some other machine. So the machine hosting the GUI does nothing but GUI. So there's only one machine I can't reboot. All the others are fair game, with some level of planning. (Notify users who are logged into hosta, that I'd like to reboot hosta, so could they please use hostb.) It's not very elegant or effective. At other sites, we're able to run all our stuff on SGE, so I can disable some machine from accepting queued jobs, and then when it's idle, reboot it. This is much more elegant and effective, but only if you can run all your stuff via SGE or some other queueing system. > Edward> Of course you can't do that for *every* thing, but whenever > Edward> possible, that's the preference. > > I wish I could do it for VNC. I guess I could build a Sun or Linux > cluster to do this... might even try. I'm not 100% sure if NX can do this, but you should look at them. They're commercial BTW. I love their products far better than VNC or X11 forwarding. Faster, more flexible, robust, reliable, easy to setup. Etc. They're free for unlimited personal use, or for a single computer in corporate use. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
