Hello,

is it somehow possible to have pound reread its configuration e.g. by 
sending a signal?
I would like to use a set of dial-up machines as real servers. But their 
IPs change.
I could write the new IPs in the config and have pound reread it 
whenever a IP change happens (every couple of hours), but I would like 
to avoid restarting pound, because of the downtime.
Since the dial-up machines have dyndns names it would also be possible 
to have pound ask the dns for the names again... but how?

Are there any suggestions?

Regards,
Oliver

Hi

I do not think pound supports rereading the config without restarting, and 
I guess it will be some time before it supports rereading the config 
without disconnecting existing connections.

But do you have any idea of what the IP addresses of the dialup machines 
will be? If so, you could configure up all of them, and use the HA feature 
to decide which ones are to receive traffic.

Another alternative is to use some vpn or tunnelling software to give each 
machine a fixed IP address on a virtual network on the pound machine.
Add a fixed address reservation for each possible backend, and pound 
should figure out by itself which machines are available.

A third suggestion that I actually think I read on the pound mailing list 
once was to have 3 pound instances. Two of them (call them A and B) are 
identically configured to access your backends, but listen on different 
ports, and only on localhost. The third pound instance (call it C) load 
balances between these two, and listen to your external IP address and 
port.

When you are to change the config you first change the config for A and 
restart that. When this goes down C will detect this, and send all traffic 
through B. When A is up again, with the new config you reconfigure B and 
restart that. Then C will send all traffic through A instead.

This is ugly, and I do not recommend it on that basis alone.
In addition, you will lose existing connections (open tcp sessions), and 
if you have configured any kind of persistence then your clients will 
probably be allocated to new backend servers as well.

Regards
Rune

---
Rune Sætre <rune.saetre(at)netcom-gsm.no>
NetCom as
..

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Oliver Hankeln wrote:

> Hello,
>
> is it somehow possible to have pound reread its configuration e.g. by sending

> a signal?
> I would like to use a set of dial-up machines as real servers. But their IPs 
> change.
> I could write the new IPs in the config and have pound reread it whenever a 
> IP change happens (every couple of hours), but I would like to avoid 
> restarting pound, because of the downtime.
> Since the dial-up machines have dyndns names it would also be possible to 
> have pound ask the dns for the names again... but how?
>
> Are there any suggestions?
>
> Regards,
> Oliver
>
>
> -- 
> To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
> Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
> http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2006/2006-06/1151415699000
>

Hi,

thanks for your quick answer!

> But do you have any idea of what the IP addresses of the dialup machines 
> will be? If so, you could configure up all of them, and use the HA 
> feature to decide which ones are to receive traffic.

No. The IPs are in the range of a big ISP and I guess that more than one 
of the machines there have an open port 80...

> Another alternative is to use some vpn or tunnelling software to give 
> each machine a fixed IP address on a virtual network on the pound machine.
> Add a fixed address reservation for each possible backend, and pound 
> should figure out by itself which machines are available.

This sound cool. I'll try that!

Thanks again!

Regards,
Oliver