management of multiple perlbal instances?

[jeff gelb]

Hey all:

I'm a new perlbal user and am evaluating how it might work for my
company for a redesign of an in-house web hosting environment.  We'd 
primarily be using perlbal as a reverse-proxy using the vhosts plugin.

There are other things out there that can do the similar things (I did a 
proof of concept with a stripped down apache + mod_proxy + mod_rewrite), 
but Perlbal seems like the best fit.  It is especially interesting for 
us because of its ability to be reconfigured on the fly.

Since we're putting together a HA environment, we'd be running multiple 
  instances of perlbal, all of which would be configured identically. 
This is easy enough when the instances are started, but doesn't seem as 
straightforward after they're running.

Since pools can look at nodefiles for their backend members, some of our 
config changes could be handled via a shared filesystem.  I don't see 
anything similar for services or vmaps, nor do I see a graceful restart 
or "reload my config files" signal or option.

How do people handle propagating configuration changes to multiple 
instances of perlbal?   I can see extending/modifying things to check 
for new config files, or by putting together a management proxy that 
could connect to each instance.  Any suggestions?  Anyone already doing 
something similar?

Thanks much.

-- jeff gelb