Stephane Caminade wrote:
Have you considered setting up some kind of Heartbeat or VRRP system ? At my lab, we use VRRP to share one IP between a master DNS and a secondary DNS which takes over if the primary fails (we have the same system for our web site and our mail server). If the slave cannot contact the master, it takes over the 'public' IP, and can start some services, like bind or dhcpd for example. There seems to be the same kind of possibilities with Heartbeat, but I haven t looked into it yet. You could maybe set up your "b" site to start sending notifications in the event that site "a" is unreachable ?
We thought about this, and the problem with the generic solutions is that they tend to be active/passive. We need both sides active and fully functional all the time, just without redundant notifications, and the failover mechanism of bb does exactly what is needed, out of the box.
We could, given enough time and effort, implement something that would do what we need, but management tends to be very conservative about change, and very reluctant to allow us to spend time on anything not related to the current projects. It's the power of inertia, and the old "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. IOW, the bb/bbgen-3.6 combo is "good enough" to keep running.
J