Can I move a 'floating' IP to another server?

[inCharge.co.uk]

Can I swap a 'floating' IP address between 2 servers to achieve a master+backup server configuration on Serverbeach? It would work like this:

- An additional IP address is assigned to the master server. This becomes the floating IP.
- The backup server is a mirror of the master.
- Both servers are in the same data-centre.
- DNS for all hosted domains & services points to the floating IP address.
- In the event that the master fails or requires maintenance then the floating IP address is switched to the backup server. This must be do-able without submitting a ticket.

The only other practical technique for achieving a master+backup configuration at ServerBeach that I’ve seen involves reducing DNS TTL to 5 minutes. The floating IP technique avoids the additional DNS traffic and the 5 minute delay to restore services after a failure.

Is this going to work?

Cheers, Julian

[QT]

No, this is not going to work. The only way to move additional IP addresses is to submit a ticket to our IP administrator and schedule a time for the swap. If you want reliable, fast, failover..you probably want to be someplace that has a load balancer option.

[inCharge.co.uk]

Hopefully one day my business will be able to afford load balanced servers, but now it can't and that's why I'm here, taking advantage of ServerBeach's great prices.

Meanwhile I don't really need load balancing because my clients' web sites only get a few hits a week. In fact most of them get more hits from seachbots than humans. What I do need though is a failure recovery strategy, so I can sleep at night.

Are you saying that I can request an IP addess to be moved but it'll take 1 ticket and up to 24 hours? Actually that would great for occasional maintenance like upgrading control panel software.

I'm not very clear on what's involved in moving an IP address.
Is the support request Service Category 'Additional IP address(es)' and Service Sub Category 'Troubleshoot'? What do support actually need to do to move an IP address?

Cheers, Julian

[knightfoo]

Support doesn't do the actual IP move, that has to be done by an IP admin. You would need to submit an "IP Request" ticket and arrange a time for the IP admin to make the change. This does not cost you an actual troubleshooting ticket though. Moving IP addresses around really isn't a viable option for failover since we don't keep an IP admin on staff 24/7.

You could use squid as a reverse proxy to accomplish this, but it would require a minimum of 3 servers to be really effective: 1 proxy server, and 2 web servers. You point all your domains at the reverse proxy server and it pulls content from whatever backend server is alive.

-knightfoo

[inCharge.co.uk]

Thanks for the Proxy tip.

I agree that using your IP administrator as a manual load balancer is not viable for failover. Using another server as a load balancer is more practical and probably still works out cheaper than rackspace. :)

I was hoping that it would be possible to automate the IP address reassignment and trigger it from monitoring software. Oh well... :(

I still don't understand why it's necessary to have human intervention in this process. If it is technically possible then I hope you will consider providing this facility in future (either via control panel or API) obviously with limitations e.g. within the same datacentre, to another server on the same account.

Cheers, Julian

[knightfoo]

A lot of things are technically feasible, but that doesn't make them a good idea. Consider what would happen if an incorrect route was entered (either accidentially or intentionally). When you are working with something as important as routing tables, a small mistake could cause very major consequences, such as knocking other customers offline or even bringing down an entire network segment. It could also lead to confusion for some customers, because they might lose track of where their IP addresses really are and cause an additional burden on support.

If we could find a safe, secure, and reliable way to do something like this (or anything else to make lives easier!) we would definitely look into it.

-knightfoo

[inCharge.co.uk]

I realise that there's not much demand for this and such a change would be so far down the 'to-do' list as to be 'not happening'. However, maybe you'd sell more servers as backups if there was an easy way to invoke them. And this would never compete with Rackspace as it's not load-balancing.

This may also remove some work from your IP administrator.

Agreed it would need to be simple and secure. How about a page on the ServerBeach control panel with a list of additional IPs, the server it's currently assigned to and a 'change' button that shows a pick-list of servers on the same account.

We'd also need an API (e.g. a SOAP call) to hook it into server monitoring software. It just returns an error code if an unauthorised request is made. Or you could link it into your own ServerBeach monitoring software. What a neat feature to be able to offer :)

Cheers, Julian