Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
One significant difference between a home network and a serious server network is that most of the functions of your home network don't matter much when you are asleep or away. Therefore a redundancy which involves you logging in as root and running a route command will work a lot better on a home network. Of course my experience is that having a sysadmin login as root and manually fail things over is better than any cluster software implementation I've seen, but that's another issue.
+1. This is the approach I have taken for SMEs as well -- I usually try to simplify it so that there is a (metaphorical or actual) throw switch, so that if it goes tits-up the customer can flip it and hopefully things will be at least usable until a trained sysadmin can clean up the mess properly. Trying to teach the computer when to flip it tends to be nontrivial and tends to introduce new SPOFs. I *want* to believe things are handled better in the Enterprise! space, but my personal experience is negligiible there and I'm a pessimist.