how to deal with hosts that are down

Stefan Monnier (monnier+comp/os/linux/networking/news/@TEQUILA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU)
22 Sep 1998 17:10:16 -0400


Every once in a while, one of our machine goes down for some reason (planned,
unplanned, ...) and annoys everybody else. Of course, if this machine is some
kind of a server, it's to be expected that things won't work quite so well, but
it seems that there should be some way to have a better failure behavior:

resolv for instance cycles through its listed servers, so if your first
server is down, it will switch to the next after a time out. *But* this
time out will be suffered for all applications over and over.
Here, it should be possible to record the failure somewhere after the first
timeout, so that subsequent uses of the resolv library will immediately
switch to the second server.

Of course, it's possible to hack something up for resolv (just like Netscape
does it for its proxies), but it seems that it should be possible to come up
with a more generic solution that would `fix' each and every such application
once and for all.

Stefan

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