Distributed setup with realtime failover/balancing

[Matt Hampton]

jonas at vrt.dk wrote:

> I plan on using ultramonkey (http://www.ultramonkey.org
> <http://www.ultramonkey.org/> ) to setup load balancing and failover. It
> uses LVS and heartbeat to do that.
> 

This is over kill!

For inbound email:

	mydomain.com IN MX 5 my.mail.server.mydomain.com


	my.mail.server.mydomain.com 2 IN A 1.2.3.4
	my.mail.server.mydomain.com 2 IN A 1.2.3.5

This works fine - causes the load balancing to be done a protocol level
and in the event of a failure will automatically failover to the other
box.  Worse case scenario is badly configured remote servers will wait
for "retry interval" minutes before delivering to the other server.



For outbound email - reading between the lines it looks like you don't
host the email on the same box as the mailscanner systems.  Depending on
you back end systems you should be able to do the same by setting a
smart host which resolves to both servers.

matt