[2098] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Redundant web pages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan Neulinger)
Wed May 15 00:57:48 1996
Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 21:59:38 -0500
To: Dan Stromberg <strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu>, lazear@gateway.mitre.org
From: Nathan Neulinger <nneul@umr.edu>
Cc: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
> > If one wants to provide a web page that is always available,
> > what mechanisms are available to create this redundant capability?
> > I know about round-robin DNS that gives a new address from a pool
> > of servers, but caching the answer means a client won't ask for a
> > new address for hours (so for them, the page is down). What other
> > means of having a redundant web page are there? Thanks for any
> > suggestions.
Well, one approach, though probably pretty inneficient would be to have a
single web server as your point of entrance... ie. www.mydomain.com, have
that server do NOTHING but redirect requests...
Basically, every request to the http://www.mydomain.com gets redirected to
another server, i.e. www-rotate-1.mydomain.com. This way, the primary
point of failure is only handling easy requests.
The redirection server could be dynamically reconfigured based on the
responsiveness of the data serving hosts (www-rotate-*.mydomain.com), and
could even do a sort of load balancing to compensate for different speed
servers.
For added stability, you could apply any of the usual redundancy schemes to
the redirection host.
-- Nathan
------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Neulinger Univ. of Missouri - Rolla
EMail: nneul@umr.edu Computing Services
WWW: http://www.umr.edu/~nneul SysAdmin: rollanet.org
