load balancing...

[Jie Gao]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, arvind rao wrote:

>   I am new to DNS admin and I need some help on load
> balancing.
> 
>   I need to setup one domain-name for 2 IP addresses
> such that if one of the machines are not up, it should
> automatically pick the other one.
>   What I saw with having just 2 "A" record entries in
> the named.domain-name/IPnetwork file was that if I try
> to ping the "domain-name", it randomly picks one of
> the 2 IP'S and if it picks the IP address of the
> machine which is down, then it just doesnt
> automatically try the other machine. How do I set it
> up so that it identifies the other machine if one
> machine is down. 
>   Is there a way to set priority level????

Round-robin is not genuine load-balancing; it's just
something that can share some load. 

It all very much depends on the client for this scheme.  First time it
is obtained from a query, the result is cached by the client machine,
and very likely only the first A record is used by the client, although
more than one can be returned by the request.

Cheers,



Jie