August 2010 Archives

To go with our Load Balanced Web Cluster, which provides good availability for your web services, providing high availability for your database is also likely to be an important requirement.  In most modern web apps, there's not much use having your webservers available constantly if your database is down.

There are a number of solutions to this with MySQL and every situation will require a different response, there are a lot of good articles out there to help you decide which solution is best. In this article we will be covering MySQL Master-Master replication and installation on Debian (Lenny) using Rackspace Cloud Servers.

The standard model of MySQL replication is a single master with multiple slaves, which provides you with very good read reliability, but writes can only be made to the master node.  This means that if the master fails, you can't just switch to another node and carry on as before, your slaves will become out of sync.  Additionally you can't load balance between your nodes for reads and writes.  By using a multiple master configuration, you can drop a node at any point and either switch your connection string to using the remaining master, or use load balancing and failover with HAProxy.

Upon creation, most Rackspace Cloud Servers have a completely open firewall policy that will allow any computer into any port on your machine.  Linux uses IPTables to firewall connections into and out of your server but needs a fair amount of configuration to get it working and for it to stay working on a reboot.

In this article we will cover basic saving and loading of IPTables rules in Debian/Ubuntu on shutdown and boot up as well as common rules that go with our other guides.