Whether or not to use the Layer-4 switch

Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer

Posted: 17 Apr 2003

Q:
MW wrote: We're thinking of using the Layer-4 switch in front of eDirectory to provide fault tolerant/redundant access to LDAP. Is this overkill or not?



A:
You should not be using L4 switch to give redundancy to the LDAP lookups. Just configure the iChain proxy with the addresses of the LDAP servers that you wish it to access. iChain creates a pool of LDAP handles and then uses them as required. If there is a failure the L4 switch can cause problems. It is better to let iChain create a pool for multiple LDAP servers with failover at the application level.

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