We have a corporate net with multiple DC servers each acting as failovers for eachother. I have to pick one as the naming provider in the LDAP LoginModules login-config.xml section. A recent outage identified a weakness in this approach, the server was turned off and all applicaitons went offline. I would like to suggest a bunch of alternate naming providers that can be used if the main one goes offline.

I've just implemented this to address the problem but have yet to test it extensively. Its not a complex fix, I just pull out <module-option name="java.naming.provider.url.backups">abc|def</module-option> tags.

I check the availability of the given server at login module initialisation. I havent figured out whether this is enough to work 'live' or require a server restart.

I'll attach what ive done for reference.