High availability SSH server

[Rui Vilao]

Greetings,

I was ask to setup a HA server under RHEL 4.0.
I was wondering if it is possible to achieve this without using a clusterware like cluster suite.

Any help/suggestion is highly appreciated.

TIA.

Kind Regards,

Rui Vilao.

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

I think that heartbeat is the software that you need. Provides single IP and failover capabilities. Check the page:

http://www.linux-ha.org/HomePage

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

HA without clustering.

I would suggest two machines, in two physical locations if possible.

You'd have to have a DNS server constantly check the availability of both machines. If one machine fails to respond to ssh and ping then the DNS record or zone database of the domain can be swapped out and the name, say sshserver will become active.

Your check script is important. If it uses ssh to check connectivity, as it should there can be a delay of 30 seconds on failover. You may be able to shorten that with ssh command line options.

BTW RH 4 clustering, which I've recently become proficient in, does not require shared storage and is rather easy to configure to do this task more reliabily.

SEP

[Rui Vilao]

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for your contributions!

Steven, what RH 4 clustering are you referring to? I believe Red Hat Cluster Services require shared storage at least for the quorum partitionâ ¦

TIA,

Kind Regards,

Rui.

[Ivan Ferreira]

See also these two pages:

http://www.vergenet.net/linux/fake/
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/04/03/linuxhacks.html