NAME SERVICE FOR A REDUNDANT ARRAY OF INTERNET SERVERS

A self-reconfiguring name service that distributes workload among the available servers in a system. A Service Monitor for each host system of a site periodically broadcasts information about available servers. The broadcast message also indicates the workload of the host. Each name service (DNS) has an associated process called a Name Binder Modifier that receives the broadcast messages from the Service Monitors. Periodically, each Name Binder Modifier reviews the information it has received from various Service Monitors and updates zones that are used by the DNS to perform load balancing. The Service Monitor and the Name Binding Modifier have associated configuration files.