IIS - Load Balancing with a File Upload - Asked By dan scan on 14-Nov-11 12:03 PM

I am currently working on an old .NET 1.1 application that is heavily used and needs to be load balanced.  We solved the session issue by using sticky sessions.  But our next problem is that users of the system can upload, edit, and delete files/folders.  What is the best way to solve this issue?  Virtual directory, but what about permission issues? Syncing software (rsync) could be an option but what about deletes and does it know what to delete and what is new? 
Is there a way to force a single page to go to a single server (there by making it the master) easily with configuration on IIS or web.config?


Redesigning the application is not an option so I can not go with a solution that stores the files in a database.

Microsoft offers some guidance on this. They have a knowledge base article with links to other resources you'll need.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815162

This article also gives some good resources.

http://wiki.asp.net/page.aspx/1248/aspnet-and-load-balancing/

Oh, and as always, ScottGu has an excellent article and a cooler way of doing it. I just found this and it looks very promising: The Microsoft Web Farm Frameworkhttp://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/08/introducing-the-microsoft-web-farm-framework.aspx

and the more recent Web Farm Framework Site has plenty of resources available.http://www.iis.net/download/webfarmframework

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7084729/load-balancing-in-asp-net-what-i-should-consider-while-development


Regards

Unfortunately the information in those links will not work well in a 1.1 environment.  I can not redo the whole architecture of the environment. 
So what I am looking for is something I can use with 1.1 without re-architecting the environment.  I am using sticky sessions on a load balancer server which solves the issue with session state.  What I am primarily concerned with is that users can upload and delete some files on the webserver via the website.  Syncing with files that can only be added or updated is ok.  But deleting files is the issue.  Since either server could have the file deleted the other server has no way of knowing what is just deleted vs what is new.

What pitfalls could I encounter if I instead setup a virtual directory that would exist only on one server?

Is there software out there that could handle the deletes correctly.  Maybe determines a delete by created or modified date?