High Availabilty cPanel servers?

[funkknight]

Greetings,

New to cPanel so please bear with me. I want to setup two cPanel servers in a High-Availabilty (well as much as possible) type fashion. I want to have one server be the primary and the other server as a hot-spare. If the first one goes down (as far as the world is concerned) then the other server needs to take over.

Is there anything available now that can do this with cPanel?

If not, then here is how I imagine I would have to approach this. As I don't have much experiance with cPanel Please correct me or direct me towards better solutions if needed:

Use heartbeat to setup virtual IPs (http://linux-ha.org, handles IP failover)
Configure both cPanel servers to use the virtual IP as it's main IP.
- May have to shutdown cPanel services on the stand-by box (ServerB) and start it during failover
Cron scripts on ServerB:
- List all accounts on primary server (ServerA) and add any that don't exist on ServerB [Cpanel::Accounting?]
- Sync home directories
- Sync FTP password files
- Sync shadow (somehow, and carefully)
- Sync anything else that seems important
Configure MySQL to do bin logging and setup Master/Slave replication
Setup DNS clustering via Cpanel

Any comments, good, bad, or of warning on this approach?

Thanks in Advance,

Damion

[damainman]

I;ve been curious on how to do this two. I'm running RHE.

[djmerlyn]

rsync and a load balancer?

[lost]

you need to go here and check these people out

http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/u/19258

50 domains for 29.95 per year full dns failover. Add domain 30 cents per year.
Won't get cheaper than that. You don't have to change anything in your current dns setups.
Complete service failover for http, ftp, and email.
TTL's can be set as low as 5 sec. How's that for speed?
No worries about this dns sync toy that cpanel has, This so called cluster function which is no cluster at all.

You can even use your own name servers . They call it 'vanity' name servers.

I have tested this extensively and failover occurs promptly and (pardon the pun) without fail.
Of course you still have to rsync your stuff to the failover server, but that is self explanatory.

Works great for server moves as well. 0 downtime guaranteed without having to play with the dns settings on each server. Well 5 sec downtime

Cheers,
T

[Aric1]

Of course, if you use dnsmadeeasy, you can't have CPANEL manage your DNS zones, you need to make all changes manually at dnsmadeeasy. Not a problem if you want fallover for a few domains, but if you have hundreds it may become a lot of work.

[lost]

Of course, if you use dnsmadeeasy, you can't have CPANEL manage your DNS zones, you need to make all changes manually at dnsmadeeasy. Not a problem if you want fallover for a few domains, but if you have hundreds it may become a lot of work.

yes, initially it's a bit of a chore, however, they do have a batch import function.

And you only have to do it one time. With Cpanel you have to worry and fix crap ALL the time.

L

[sawbuck]

Was able to find the info for using personal name servers at dnsmadeeasy here:
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/s0306/tuts/vanitydns.html