This is not about an FTP cluster installation with high availability and/or stand-by/fail-over - it's about creating some kind of network disk stripe using FTP as disk and client access protocol.
If you're new to ftpcluster you might want to read the whole introduction.
If you are running a cluster and you have question or suggestions please send your comments to dag@awk-scripting.de.
Latest News
Somehow the link to the download location to ftpcluster was lost. Fetch the latest release from the download area.
This release brings three new programs: listserver, syscheck and sysrepair. There is also some documentation about FXP and how to configure it.
I have setup a working 3-node FTP cluster. It was somewhat challenging. The three node servers run different FTP server software and configuring them for replication (where server-server copy is used) was difficult, server-server copy (aka FXP) had to be enabled on all three node. Although FXP is part of the FTP RFC it's usually disabled on most servers because you can use FXP for so called bounce attacks. Since FXP is important for ftpcluster I'll collect some information about how to configure FXP for different servers.
There was also another suprise. I had to change the way how replicate does the server-server copy. The STOR command is now sent first to the receiving server and then the RETR to the sending server (this is also the way how RFC 959 can be understood). Otherwise, as I found out, the average FTP server don't like if RETR is issued first. I did not encouter this problem in my test bed because the server software isn't picky about this.