At long last, after a lot of dithering, confusion and tinkering, I have built my first ever highly available, load balanced web server cluster using the intriguingly named Ultra Monkey software. What does this mean? Well, basically I have two old PCs on (or under) my desk, which act together as a web server. If you request a web page, one or the other will respond (you can't tell as a user which it will be), and if you turn off either of them, the web site is still available.
What's the point? Well, at work we supply quite a lot of data over web and FTP services, and need to make the system more resilient so that (a) if one computer breaks, the service is not interrupted, and (b) if someone is accessing an enormous amount of data, this shouldn't affect other people's access to their own data. My toy system is a test to try out the technology, see if it will do what we need, and an opportunity for me to learn on the job. It's not really that complicated as these things go, but I've learnt a lot from the process, having started off knowing very little about what was involved. A small personal triumph!
Sorry, no you can't access my system from the internet. As a test system it is only visible from within our site firewall. Besides, it's not really very exciting (except to me and my boss) and I'm going to turn it off in half an hour or so.
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