auto-backup across the net

[charles radley]

Good point.

High availability systems usually involve multiple processors.

The main processor sends out a heartbeat signal to a separate monitoring
processor.

The monitoring processor checks the heartbeat arrives on time.  If it times
out then it can take whatever corrective action is programmed.

These systems of course are not cheap.

Jeff Zucker wrote:

> Austin Schutz wrote:
>
> >>>Here's the situation.  I'm building a mission-critical web-based
> >>>database.  It's hosted on a server at, say,
> >>>http://www.serverone.foo/bigdata.cgi.
> >>>
> >>>If that server goes down, even for an hour, I want to be able to
> >>>
> >                                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >
> >>>immediately tell my clients to switch to another server (at another
> >>>
> >     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >
> >
> >       This part of the question has yet to be answered as far as I
> > can tell. Of course I might have just spaced through the answer.
> >       How do you tell the clients? Presumably there's a simple way to
> > send a redirect in a cgi
>
>    If the server is down, it's a bit hard to redirect with a cgi on the
> server :-).
>
> --
> Jeff
>
> TIMTOWTDI

TIMTOWTDI