I think there are some important distinctions to make here. First, what I was referring to was a type of HA setup for the Validator only. (nothing to do with Sentry Nodes). We were discussing how you would run more than 1 Validator in order to make it High Available. We determined that it theoretically should be possible to run a Validator and a Full Node side by side behind a type of Load Balancer or Proxy. You could have some kind of health check running on the validator and if it fails, it turns the Full Node into a Validator (with the same key) and routes traffic to it. This isn’t really “load balancing” because there is only 1 server receiving traffic at all times. But a load balancer could be used to achieve it. I hope that makes sense.
Another thing to note with this setup, is you would need a way to manage state between the two Validators. Like when a new Sentry comes online, you could use the /dial_peers endpoint to add it to the Validator. But you would have to make sure the secondary Validator knows about the new Sentry as well in case of failover.
For the Sentry Nodes specifically, that’s something I’m try to dig into now. I’m not familiar enough with them and how they work yet, so I can’t really speculate on how to handle those. Maybe someone could answer a question I have regarding those…
Where does the node_id come from and what is it used for? It seems like maybe it’s derived from the ~/.gaiad/config/node_key.json? I understand that other peers are expecting that node_id to match the node_id of the Sentry they are connecting to, but what’s stopping you from running 10 Sentrys with the same node_id? For example, if I had a load balancer on the domain validator.example.com and I have 10 Sentrys behind that load balancer all with the same node_id, wouldn’t that work fine for others to connect? I’m probably missing something there…