A crash course in server administration

meowN — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:52:02 -0800

At work I'm jumping head first into trying to setup and manage a OS X Server to be used for network load balancing, routing, and possibly netbooting a group of machines. Any tips or help appreciated. I'm currently working retail at a computer sales store that also has an internet cafe of about 30 computers. I've asked for, and been given permission to play around with and attempt to configure, an OS X Server 10.5.7 running on a dual-processor G5 (with 5 ethernet ports, 2 for WAN and the other 3 for each subnet). I've never really used the mac os before, but have a few years of playing around with various linux distros as my desktop os.

For most of these questions I'm not needing direct answers even, I've really just been at a loss trying to find good online resources to read and put it all together. I really want to learn and get a grasp on what's going on, so even just links to reading to get me started would be excellent.

Issue 1: network load balancing. In the store we have two separate DSL lines coming in to serve the whole building. From what I've read so far, it seems that OSX doesn't have this functionallity built-in, and I'm at a loss as to where to start looking for a solution.

Issue 2: Routing. This one I feel like I've gotten really close and am just missing one last step. The goal here is to have DHCP and NAT running for 3 subnets; the tech/service area, the internet cafe, and our internal network. I have the DHCP/NAT/Firewall services all running, and dhcp is working properly giving each subnet an appropriate IP address, I'm able to ping the local server from a client machine, but it's not actually sharing the internet connection to any of the subnets. (Haven't had the chance to hook up a switch to any of the subnets yet either, so don't know if client machines would be able to see each other on the network as well.)

Hypothetical 1: netbooting for the 30+ computers in the internet cafe. As it is currently, the cafe has about 3 or 4 different models of computers all running windows xp. The problem is, they're all regular installations, so if during the course of a days use one gets a virus, we have to manually take a disk to the machine to re-image it. I'd like to set it up to where each machine could just load a fresh image off the network each morning and run like new. This I'm not familiar with at all, and don't even know if OSX can even netboot a WinXP machine.

Besides this there will probably be some basic file sharing and web hosting, but those seem pretty well documented and I'm not worried about getting that running.

So any tips, links, answers, or leads would be excellent. I'm hoping to get this machine configured and possibly even implemented into the network by the end of next week.

how is proper load-balancing done these days?

helios — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:54:44 -0800

What are large websites using these days to load-balance their traffic? I have been using round-robin DNS on my site which has five front-end web servers. I am beginning to realize why this is not a good idea - first of all, the first IP address in the round-robin chain seems to get a disproportionately high amount of traffic, and secondly, if one of the servers goes down, then 1/5 of my users can't access the site until I either fix the problem or change the DNS and allow it to re-propagate.

I have realized that many high-volume sites that I visit have a DNS entry that only resolves to a single IP address. So what are they doing differently?

I'm assuming that they are using a "load balancing" device, but is this just a reverse proxy server running Squid or Apache, which would itself be as vulnerable to hardware faults as any other server?

Or are there specific high-availability "load balancing" devices (like something Cisco would make) which automatically act as the front-end for all servers, taking a server out of the loop if it stops responding and/or notifying me by mail? If so, where can I find these devices?

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A crash course in server administration

how is proper load-balancing done these days?