iChain Redundancy
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
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Q:
JG wrote: I have a local college that wants to front end almost their entire web site, secured and unsecured areas, with iChain. However, they can't currently afford an L4 switch for redundancy in case any of the iChain boxes fail. Any ideas on a more cost effective solution?
A:
Take a look at Authentication Session Broker in the iChain documentation.
The Session Broker feature is useful when you have more than one iChain server running at your site. Session Broker allows "sessions" (user authentication data) to be shared between multiple iChain servers, which, in turn, allows a user to authenticate only once when browsing across all of them.
For example, if a user browses to a page on your site protected by iChain Server A, iChain will ask the user to authenticate before granting access to the page. Suppose that during the course of browsing, the user is directed to a page protected by iChain Server B. Without Session Broker, the user would be required to authenticate again because iChain Server B has no way of knowing that the user was authenticated on Server A.
When Session Broker is running, iChain servers relay all their authenticated users. When a user who isn't authenticated attempts to access a protected page, iChain will ask the Session Broker if this user is authenticated to a different iChain server. If so, the user is granted access without the need to authenticate again.
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