pileofrogs has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Background

I'm setting up a pair of web servers to have failover redundancy. If the main server fails, the backup server takes over.

I'm trying to automate testing of my prototype. I figure I'll need two pieces, a "observer" that sits on a client machine and watches and coordinates the action, gathers results etc... Then I'll need a "gremlin". There will actually be two gremlins, one on each server. The gremlins will cause failures and forward internal information to the observer.

Actual Question

Whats a good way to facilitate the communication between those three guys? Quick and easy is my highest priority. This will only run in my test lab (I don't want gremlins causing failures on my real servers) so stability and security aren't a big priority.

The observer needs to be able to tell the gremlins when to cause failures. The gremlins need to confer among themselves to coordinate the failures. The gremlins also need to be able to tell the observer all kinds of status info about the server that gremlin is running on.

Thanks Monks!

-Pileofrogs

Updates:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Recommend quick & dirty IP communications module?
by suaveant (Parson) on Jan 05, 2006 at 06:23 UTC
    IO::Socket::INET and IO::Select are pretty easy to use and don't require a whole lot of code to get a lot done, I would suggest stick with them (though there may be a module out there that makes this even simpler.) You just need something like:

    Observer

    Read more... observer.pl (2 kB)
    and Gremlin
    Read more... gremlin.pl (1186 Bytes)

    Now, I just threw these together, but they do work. You would obvoiusly have to work your own code in here somehow rather than my sleep 1;

    Also, if you look closely, you'll see where I didn't put any real error checking :) I leave that to you ;)

    this should give you a start. You could have your gremlins connect to each other if they need to chat with each other, the server model is probably simpler, though.

    make sense?

                    - Ant
                    - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)

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Re: Recommend quick & dirty IP communications module?
by astroboy (Chaplain) on Jan 05, 2006 at 07:20 UTC
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Re: Recommend quick & dirty IP communications module?
by zentara (Cardinal) on Jan 05, 2006 at 12:14 UTC
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