Bongoyo: Simple High Availability

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What is Bongoyo

Bongoyo is a high latency (in the order of 1 minute) failover daemon for various unixy machines. It is intended to be easily deployed and extensible.

HA is achieved by having redundant/failover server(s) takeover the IP of the virtual server(s). The IP takeover is done through simple IP aliasing without taking over any link-layer hardware address.

Features

Cross platform support is pretty much as simple as writing the proper perl module.
Checks both IP reachability as well as service availability (with the help of a service specific perl module).
Simple to deploy--"low level" OS tweaking should be minimal.
Flexible design makes it very easily extensible with modules.
Can have X (X > 0) redundant servers (possibly of different OSes and platforms) fronting for Y (Y > 0) virtual servers.

What it is not

Not a beowulf-style clustering solution--does not distribute/migrate/share processes/memory.
Not a low latency/immediate failure detection and take-over solution.
Probably not a solution if the target service requires the virtual server to initiate connection to clients, who might not like the source address in the IP datagrams.

Example usage

Objective: A HA LPRng lpd server called v1.

Solution: Set up two failover servers, f1 and f2, so that each of them can provide the LPRng service of v1. Install bongoyo and create the appropriate bongoyo.conf file. Start the bongoyo daemons on f1 and f2, then watch as one of them take over the IP of v1.

Job done. Submit request for a long vacation.

Documents

The documents will attempt to describe (in a somewhat ad hoc manner) details regarding bongoyo. The details are separated into these sections:

Download

Get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/bongoyo/.

Page mangling by Edwin Lim.

Tue Oct 3 02:26:56 EDT 2000