Distributed programming

[Pupeno]

Hello.
I have a basic question on distributed programming. My case is: I have a 
module called launcher which opens a tcp port and listens to connections. 
When a new connection is made, another process is launched to attend that 
connection.
Now, when I think about distributing this for load balancing I see this 
possibilities:
- Run various launchers on various computers and do the balancing through DNS.
- Run one launcher on one computer and make the launched processes run on 
other computers.
The first has the advantage of providing high-availability as well and all the 
processes may access the same (mnesia) database. This is something that I 
could possible do in C (or C++, Python or any language) using MySQL and MySQL 
clustering, am I wrong ?
The second... the second, is it possible at all ? Can I launch a process in 
another node and still let it handle a local socket ? And is it possible to 
have a pool of nodes and launch new process in the one with less load ?
Somehow I feel like I am not seeing the whole picture (or that I am missing 
some important Erlang feature).
Can anybody enlighten me ? (reading material is welcome).
-- 
Pupeno <pupeno@REDACTED> (http://pupeno.com)

PS: When I mention servers thing about typical Internet servers: web, smtp, 
pop3, imap, dns, jabber, etc.
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