[ILUG] TCP load balancing on rinetd (or anything else)

[John P . Looney]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 02:17:17PM -0000, Adrian Flynn mentioned:
> This seems a simple solution... I am currently using ipchains on the
> firewall/load balancer. Is it a big job to switch to iptables? The benefits
> would seem to be worthwhile.

 It's a big enough difference, but not massive. For a start, you get
stateful rules; so you can do stuff like

 iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

 to accept all inbound (assuming eth0 is the external interface) traffic,
that's due to an existing outbound connection. Well good.

 Packet Marking also rocks. You can just mark packets you like, or don't
like, and then at the end of your file, do something to them. One great
use is "imagine if you had 70 machines, all with different IPs & subnets,
and you want all of them to have inbound http". Just mark each one, and
then use a single rule to do something with those marked packets. Much
hander than having 70 rules (plus another 70 to handle inbound stuff).

> Note that I am using the SuSE 7.0 Professional distribution. This is
> published with an iptables package, yet all the iptables documentation
> refers to kernel 2.3 or above. Is this a SuSE patched version? The SuSE
> website is down at the moment, so I can't check it out.

 Do a search for "Rusty's unreliable guides". There is next to no
documenation for iptables, unfortunately. Again, iptables is a 2.4 thing.

Kate

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