(RADIATOR) High Availability with MySQL

[Martin Burton]

Hi Joe,

>
> I've searched and read a bit about high availability on this list, but
> most of the posts are quite out-dated and only a few mention actual
> working setups beyond pure theory. So I was wondering if someone had
> such a setup running or could give a few thoughts about the available
> options.

The simplest solution which works nicely for us is simply to use two boxes.

I have Radiator installed on both and a Makefile in the configuration
directory that uses a bit of perl munging (to change parts of the config
that are machine specific) and rsync to keep the two machines in sync so
that configuration is as simple as making a change on one server and
then using:

make sync

and optinally

make restart  (which restarts both radiator instances).

For authentication schemes which use a mySQL DB, I just use mySQL
replication to keep the DBs in sync on both machines (the DB and
Radiator aren't hit hard enough to require having the database on
another machine).  Yes, it's a little bit of work to get the databases
back in sync after a failure, but it's not going to happen too often if
you are using robust hardware and RAID.  I've only had to do it once in
the last 4 years.  Having said that I've probably just invited another
failure ;-)

Failover is performed at the client side (by setting primary and
secondary radius servers) which helps keep things simple.

If you need something more robust than this then the Linux-HA project is
probably the best place to start researching.

HTH.

Regards,

Martin.
-- 
Martin Burton
Senior Systems Administrator               \\\|||///
Special Projects Team                     \\  ^ ^  //
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute            (  6 6  )
-----------------------------------------oOOo-(_)-oOOo---
t: +44 (0)1223 496945             http://www.sanger.ac.uk

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