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Quickly Switching Your Servers to Backups?

Posted by Cliff on from the fast-failover dept.

moogoogaipan writes "After a few days thinking about the quickest way to bring my website back to the internet users, I am still stuck at DNS. From experience, even if I set the TTL for my DNS zone file as low as 5 minutes, there are still DNS servers out there won't update until a few days later (Yeah. I'm looking at you, AOL). Here is my situation. Say that I have my web servers and database servers at a remote backup location, ready to serve. If we get hit by an earthquake at our main location, what can I do in a few hours to get everyone to go to our backup location?"

1 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Server Clusters by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
    > Only problem is if you're locating them in two separate locations that they need to be able to communicate with each other and keep identical copies of the website and be able to connect to any databases you may need.

    Depending on the industry, that's a very real problem.

    Sysadmin: "Don't worry, we're already switched over to the hot spare, just get out of there!"
    CIO: "What if the whole building goes?"
    Sysadmin: "No worries. Remember that $1M we spent stringing all that fiber over to the other datacenter?"
    CIO: "Oh yeah, the one in WTC 2!"
    Sysadmin: "Aaw, shit."