Ok, this really doesn’t work very well. I was hoping that if a server went offline, when it went back online it would automatically update itself. Well, it doesn’t. You have to manually backup the running server and import it to the 2nd server and then start the replication system again. It’s pretty terrible.
There’s TONs of info about master->slave setups where only the master has write access and the slaves are read-only, but very little about setting up completely redundant servers where both databases mirror each other and if one stops the other keeps going. I guess this is simply not something that’s done very much, or because it’s so advanced, there’s not a lot written about it. The instructions I have seen are very complicated indeed.
So, in hopes of simplifying things, I’m thinking about just a cron job that backs up one database and then updates the other. I guess using mysqldump and mysqlimport unless someone has a better suggestion.