A Q&A from January's Tips and Tricks Section
Articles and Tips: qna
01 Mar 2003
Q.
I just finished reading the January 2003 Net Management's Tips & Tricks section regarding SLP configuration. The dual DA configuration is the exact same SLP design we have deployed in our network. The one drawback to this design which wasn't discussed in the article is object collision.
With 2 DAs registering objects into the same named scope, we see 0_1, 0_2 etc. objects from time to time. This of course becomes a "stuck obit" situation.
Is there any research or information on setting up a redundant SLP design without the object collisions or at least minimizing that issue? I'd love to see this passed along to engineering for some more background/detail.
Dueling DAs in Detroit
A.
Dear Dueling DAs: Jeff Fischer, one of DNU's resident programmers, offers this solution:
Probably the quickest and maybe the most efficient solution to this is to make one of the replicas on one of the DA servers a read-only replica instead of a read/write. This way, you only have one server that is writing to the Directory and thus avoiding object collisions. This essentially creates a "primary" DA server and a "secondary" server that will provide SLP services on the network, which is probably all that is needed.
Or you can have the "backup" DA server configured but not loaded. SLPDA is not loaded on that server so you only have one DA on the network that is writing to the Directory. If the "primary" DA server goes down you load SLPDA on the "backup" DA server and you still have SLP services on the network. You lose the automatic failover for SLP services with this method because you have to manually load the DA when the "primary" DA goes down, but you avoid object collisions.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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