Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL!WANCHO From: WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL ("Frank J. Wancho") Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Host-down redirects? Message-ID: Date: 1 Sep 88 09:41:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 29 Monday evening SIMTEL20 came back online after being down for 18 days awaiting air conditioner repair. During the downtime, we activated duplicate logins on our sister site in St. Louis. However, unless our users happened to call in or paid attention to previous announcements to check the signon banner at the St. Louis host, they had no way of knowing to try the alternate host. That was one problem - admittedly one of having our users know our SOP. The other problem was that some, possibly critical or time-critical mail was eventually returned to the sender during that interval. And, as far as I know, there is no "automatic" redirection possible. Or is there? What I have in mind is that, given that I could have made the St. Louis host think that its alias was SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL (and the older SIMTEL20.ARPA) via a quick modification to the hosts tables, would it have been (and is it) possible to have gotten our PSN to redirect connection requests intended for our downed host to the St. Louis host for the duration of the downtime? If not, why not? For those of us who take the requirement for mandatory Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP) seriously, such a feature would close the gap and make it reasonable to implement when needed. Note: I am aware of the clever solution to this problem implemented at BRL, but I'm not prepared to move off the backbone at this time (due to our heavy traffic which would probably swamp most gateways) to take advantage of that route. --Frank