| In general the "are-you-alive" messages are redundant, as the data exchange messages serves the same purpose. While my legal encumbrances prohibit helping you with actual code, I would recommend looking at watchdog processes. For example, even a simple systemd periodic trigger that runs a script every minute that does general house keeping can work. i.e. a small script has the advantage of minimal library dependencies, fast/finite run state, and flexible behavior (checking cpu/network loads for nuisance traffic, and playing possum when a set threshold exceeded.) Distributed systems is hard, but polling generally does not scale well (i.e. the cost of a self-check is locally fixed, but balloons on a cluster if going beyond a few fixed peer-checks). And yeah, some clowns that think they are James Bond have been DDoS small boxes on Sun (they seem to be blindly hitting dns and ntp ports hard). We had to reset the tripwire on a 6 year old hobby host too. tip, rate limiting firewall rules that expose whitelisted peers/admins to bandwidth guarantees is wise. Otherwise any cluster/heartbeats can be choked into a degraded state. Don't take it personally, and enjoy a muffin with your tea. =3 |