different voting server IP address

Question

Tell me please, why does the RPC server at https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com return different information about the voting server's IP address, even though the server itself does not change? For example, when running the following code:

while true; do echo "voting_ip=$(solana gossip | grep 9SjGU3tzdEXfLaVsLpnTwP3inBNhAPMq4XKupUf9Ms5E | awk '{print $1}')" sleep 1 done

I get varying outputs such as:

voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=91.211.83.203 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=91.211.83.203 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=91.211.83.203 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=193.34.213.254 voting_ip=91.211.83.203 voting_ip=193.34.213.254

Answer 1

This validator may have been cycling between two different physical nodes. It's possible to setup a hot backup to take over voting, for whenever the primary node goes down. For what it's worth, in my own testing, I've only seen one voting IP for this node.

This guide might be out of date, but it explains the general concept: https://docs.solanalabs.com/operations/guides/validator-failover