hi, not sure if i'm being silly, not had enough coffee or it cant be done. basically, in a quick summary, want to have a proxy.conf which, for a realm will use a bunch of servers in load balance mode...and if those fail, then use another group of servers in a fail-over mode eg server_pool groupA { serverA serverB serverC client-load-balance } server_pool groupB { serverD } server_pool groupX { groupA groupB fail-over } with realm xxxxx.org using auth pool groupX (obviously serverA etc are defined as home_server....i've stripped some of the right words/config for brevity) therefore I'd have a nice load balance for clients to a bunch of servers....but if they all went wonky, i'd have a nice solid fallback server to use..... c'est possible? alan