Home/ Questions/Q 279081
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T05:00:08+00:00

Suppose I have two servers and I have set up DNS round robin as

  • 0

Suppose I have two servers and I have set up DNS round robin as following:

www   IN  A   192.168.0.2
www   IN  A   192.168.0.3

From this FAQ, it states that “all of the latest browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome) support a client retry (sometimes called browser retry). So when it times out because a server is down, it will retry and hit the next server in the round robin”.

My question is: If I want to let the web server in 192.168.0.2 stay running, what should it return (HTTP status code? connection refuse?) so that some request (e.g. host header = cde.com) are redirected to 192.168.0.3?

UPDATE:
Or should I just close the tcp socket if the host header does not match?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think the retry you are referring to is occurring at the TCP/IP level – if you return an HTTP response, you are pretty much saying “Hi there! I’m a webserver! I’m alive!”

    What you could try then is blocking all port 80 traffic using iptables on the .2 server, perhaps with some extra rules to let you continue testing?

    Edit: since that won’t fly, I’d suggest putting something at the HTTP level in front of the webservers, such as haproxy, to let you balance and manage the incoming requests.

    • 0