Server Heart beat monitor

[Jim Patterson]

Is there a simple way to implement failover on linux.  I have currently 
got a Web Server which is being used to interface with a database.
Recently one of the guys here started to running some backups files to 
this server via scp.  A lot of backup files and it created DoS.  Luckily 
only one person noticed before we realized the source of the problem.
We have a backup web interface, we have DNS on linux, but I'm not 
exactly sure of the approach to take to automatically bring a 2nd server 
online, when the primary fails. Any ideas would be appreciated.

-- During the last episode the server responded to pings, but was 
very,very slow when serving pages.