Multiple Machines acting as one

From: Dave C. Boyle <dboyle_at_mail.liquidaccess.net>
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 22:53:44 -0500

Hello everyone, hope everyone is taking the weekend off unlike myself...
Anyways here is a question that isn't really DU related (it is unix
related) but it is about DU because it is running on two OSF boxes. With
that said, sorry if people think this is "off topic".

We have several Alpha boxes (1000's of various speeds) and one of them is a
bit flaky. So I wrote a shell script that every five minutes backs up all
data from one machine (the flakey one, refered to as the master) to a
directory on the other (the slave). I am using NFS to do this, and because
I couldn't effectively get NIS running (and because the timeline was "needs
to be done yesterday) I am using my own little password "copy" script to
check for updates to password and accounts on the master and it copies them
over to the slave. The script runs fine. The other script is the "panic" as
I call it script, it checks the status of the master server, and if it
can't ping it, it unmounts the NFS drives, and links the local directories
to the /var/spool/mail and local user directories (I know not pretty, but
it does work). It then brings up aliases for the master's IP Address and
acts like it (or better said should act like the master). From a user
standpoint it is great cause they don't notice the difference. They still
telnet to the master machine (but they get the slave). The only problem
with all of this is mail. The machines have the exact same sendmail.cf (and
the masters main purpose is mail collection for several domain's using the
Cwdomain.name convention in sendmail) but when the slave takes over it
starts bouncing mail for everyone because it sort of thinks it is the right
place, but bounces because of a local config error. Now would putting an
entry into the sendmail.cf of the fully quantified name (ie
mail.domain.name) correct this? Do I change the slaves hostname to match
that of the slave? I am just worried about doing any of these without a
really good way of testing it (bringing down the master and watching the
results isn't the best way <g>). So if someone could let me know what they
think that would be great.

As always thanks for all the help.

-Dave

___________________________________________________________________________
"Although we are not allowed, under law, to kill ourselves or to take drugs
 that the good folk think might be bad for us, we are allowed to buy a
 handgun and shoot as many people as we can get away with" -Gore Vidal
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 computers that run the world" -Drake Business School TV Ad
___________________________________________________________________________
Received on Mon Aug 26 1996 - 05:07:10 NZST

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