Today has, thus far, been somewhat less useful. Our CenturyTel connection was flaking badly this morning. Received mail was working fine (it automagically uses the other connection as needed), but not being able to deliver to remote servers had the Charizard queue growing by several hundred messages an hour. Fun! Anyway, by the time I'd failed everything over to the Tranquility connection, CenturyTel were fine again. Grrr.
Anyway, I learned a bit from this. No matter how nice your automated ping-failure detection, sometimes errors don't show up in ping times. DNS-based failover is nifty - with the right TTLs, you can keep downtime down to minutes rather than hours; combine with MRTG graphs, and you can see success/failure in near-real-time, too. Nifty. Also, DNS_Balance, by Hiroshi Yukota is sweet. x.farm.tsghelp.com redirects to a copy of Balance, which dynamically replies with either of our connections based upon a simple text file. That file is trivial to update (I'm working on scripts to do it automatically), and traffic gets directed as needed. Nice and simple, and its in Ruby so no buffer overruns!
My TSG database programming continues apace. Last night, I validated by LightWeightList design - it is MUCH quicker than DataSets, which is good. I should have a somewhat-working prototype soon.
Also, SqWebmail is a great product - fast and lightweight, but butt ugly. My new mission is to make it look prettier!
Mood: hungry
Music: New Model Army - Ballad of Bodmin Pill
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