Random Thoughts on Life

A Matter of Trust

Well the stray cat showed his ugly side in the last couple of weeks. Two weeks ago, we had a meeting about enhancing our multiple redundant system failover. Our application software can be configured so that if the primary system goes down, a backup system can be brought online to continue transaction processing. We have two methods of doing this, one where the backup system assumes the network identity (IP address, MAC address, system name) of the primary system, and one where the two systems simply swap system names and use DNS resolution to reroute the traffic. We are working on an enhancement to allow multiple backup systems to be employed for larger Credit Unions (when you have a Billion in assets, you can't go down) and the clients want to be able to mix the two modes of failover, which presents a number of issues. We were having a meeting to go over them, and my boss proposed a novel (to me) solution of using the network hardware to present a fixed IP within a network that the networking hardware will route to either the current active box at a different IP, and when failover occurs, update the networking hardware with the new destination address. (Networking is not my focus, I was there because I know the host software involved in the failover system.) Well within 5 minutes, not only had the stray cat stated that he "proposed using the network to route the traffic when failover was originally developed" he had almost claimed my bosses' idea as his own. It was so bad, his peer had to call him on it in the meeting.

posted by MrPopman @ 10:30 PM