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| High Availability - 2007/11/15 | Viewed 64 times this month, last update: 2007/11/15
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| Ever since I worked for the now-defunct Techfuel, a main focus of my work has been toward ensuring reliable access to something. A web site, a database, a messaging system, data itself. The concept of designing computer systems to deliver a service reliably is called High Availability (HA). It is important to my work, and it is an interesting and fun concept for me to just play with.
One of my first exposures to HA, at Techfuel, was the "rack" product we were creating, which my friend Chris Bell was designing the hardware for. His design ensured that at worst, any one piece of equipment in "the rack" could fail, without disrupting the web site it was hosting. Other developers were working on the web server software, which itself had HA in mind by being able to run many instances in parallel. As long as the load-balancers were working, all but one of the web servers could fail, and it'd still keep chugging along.
My involvement in that project was the internal monitoring application. I designed that application to run as a single instance, but in a distributed, modular and redundant configuration, so that pieces of the network could fail, or detach, and the monitoring software would continue to function, even if it was split right in half! That application was released to me after Techfuel folded, and is now available here, on the [Argus] page.
I'm still working with HA designs at work, but why limit the fun to work? When my old server centrum died, I replaced it with two servers, "one" and "two". Over the last several months, I've slowly been working to configure them as an HA cluster to serve up the services I run: web, mail, LDAP, PostgreSQL and DNS. I've finally got it almost done, and it works pretty well!
One is the primary for all services. Two runs bind for DNS and is a slave for the zones one serves, as well as a couple external zones. Two is also a slave for LDAP, using OpenLDAP's slurpd process. OpenLDAP has a nifty write redirection feature, so both one and two are active for LDAP service. Two is also a slave for my PostgreSQL database, which runs this site. I'm using PostgreSQL's log-shipping replication system, so PostgreSQL on two is sitting in a half-up state most of the time, just reading in work logs from one's Postgres. The Balance program is running on both one and two, managing postgresql connections. If one is up, it'll get the postgresql traffic, but if it goes down, connections will go to two. Both one and two serve all web sites, and both run Postfix and Courier IMAP for mail service, but the www and mail names resolve to an IP addreess managed by the Heartbeat program, so while one is healthy, it gets all the web and IMAP traffic. When heartbeat detects that one has failed, it'll steal the IP address for web and mail, then execute a program I'm working on which will swap some sym-links to bring mail delivery local for two, wake up the local PostgreSQL, and physically turn off one by sending a command to a smart power-strip. (An HA concept called shoot-the-other-node-in-the-head!) It's neat stuff to me, and fun to play with, not to mention useful!
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Comments:
Steve K (2007-11-21): Great stuff Erik! I need to read up on postgres' replication offerings...
Erik (2007-11-21): There are a few. PG 8.2 (maybe 8.1) supports log-shipping, which is what I'm using. DDL and DML statements get propogated, which is nice. Slony-I is asynchronous, but the slaves can be used for read-only work. Cybercluster and Sequoia are master-master replication systems, but both are a little wonky seeming, for now. I've used both log-shipping and Slony-I in full-production, and both work well, but for different purposes. Log shipping is great for warm-standby, and is easy to setup, but the slave is not accessible at all until activated. Slony-I takes more work to get setup, and manage (DML statements are not transparently replicated), but allows parts of a database to be replicated, etc.
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