Hello,

I have an upcomming project where one of the goals is to build a server program using winsock that will run on multiply machines and talk to each other.
This is to make failover and eventually load balancing possible.

The system will consist of 2 or maybe 3 servers running the same program and a bunch of clients.

The clients periodicly check if the used server is up and if not it should get reconnected to another server in this "farm".

The client should be easy to build but on the server side I could use some reading material or suggestions how to construct such a protocol.
The server should both act as a server for other servers and the clients and also as a client for the other servers because it will need to syncronize with the other servers all the time.
There are probably more ways this syncronize mechanism could work and I already thought about some. But before I go waste my time on failed coding attempts I wanted to ask if you can suggest some material to read or maybe direct me to examples or other projects which has done this.

Thanks in advance.

// CyberHeg
Posted on 2003-06-20 02:08:35 by CyberHeg
This is effectively a "multihomed network" and as such, you should seek out the leading purveyors of this technology, such as Yahoo! Inc., and the specifics of their technology, such as ip datacasting, which allows an isp to provide transparent local ip aliasing (Network Address Translation) while reducing bandwidth to a silly fraction for things like voice datacasting - imagine that 1000 users on an isp are listening to "Hackers' Lounge:2" in voice, thats 1000 copies of the SAME data - now imagine that they all listen to ONE copy, provided by the ISP... that's what datacasting is about ;) In actuality, Yahoo! Inc. use a range of voice servers (separate to textchat) and also a range of nameservers which will attempt to direct users to their geographically nearest voiceserver - even though all voiceservers still communicate on an internal wan between themselves and also quality servers whose job is just to measure and report voice quality to the servers , who then relay it to clients... this is the kind of model to look up to for the time being :)
Posted on 2003-06-24 02:28:43 by Homer