Failover without load balancing

[Helge Blischke]

Andrew Miskell wrote:

> Is it possible to have the failover capability without load balancing?
> Like an active/passive setup?
> 
> We have a fairly large installation of clients that we want to centrally
> manage their printing. We would be looking to put in a CUPS server in each
> of our major datacenters (2 in the US, one in Europe and another in Asia),
> but we only want the clients in each datacenter to print to their local
> CUPS servers unless that server where to fail, then print to one of the
> other CUPS servers until the local server is active again.
> 
> Load balancing would be great for CUPS servers in the same building, but
> we would prefer not to be sending print jobs all over the world if there's
> a perfectly working CUPS server in the same room.

As Michael Sweet replied, CUPS itself does not provide this functionality,
but you might take into account one of the open source application 
monitoring systems around. One of them I have some experience with is
NAGIOS (see http://www.nagios.org ). It can monitor the CUPS servers
(using ssl connections) and switching to another server if needed. 

Helge