Shortly after I put my article on clustering up, Nathan dropped by with an excellent point...

You don't HAVE to have a second network card for a Domino cluster.

It's recommended. Advised. IBM will probably give you a stern talking to if you phone them for support on a single-NIC cluster server. But it WILL work with one network card.

For production servers, you'd be nuts to think about such things. But for development and testing servers - providing you're not attempting realistic load testing - a single network card will suffice.

You might have noticed that the article had a certain wry look on how hard clustering is in Domino. I must admit that I purposefully complicated issues by putting the requirement for a second network card in there, because:

1. If I didn't, Domino Clustering would look so simple that nobody could possibly take it seriously.
2. Two cards is certainly best practice, and I don't want to be accused of deviating from best practice.

That having said, it looks like I forgot to put the command into the article where you tell the server to use the second network card... Whoops.

But then again, I can think of at least three ways you could set that option. Here's the rough overview, though:

• Add your second network card to the machine, and configure it under the OS with the correct settings.
• Add the port in the Domino Administrator Client, by going to the Server -< Port -< Setup... menu whilst in the Server -< Status tab
• In the Domino Directory, make sure that the port's network address is specified correctly in the server's Server Document - this is one of those rare occasions when using an IP address to explicitly declare the address is the correct thing to do!
• At the server console, type the following: set config SERVER_CLUSTER_DEFAULT_PORT=$portname, where $portname is the name of the port assigned to the second network card
• Restart the server

I did say Clustering was hard... ;-)

Why not update the article itself? Because it was intended more as humorous observation than a technical article, and tagged as such. I'll make a note in the comments, but nothing more...

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