[ILUG] load balancing in linux

[pbm]

Paul O'Malley, Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 12:14:45AM +0000:
> yes I would prefer hardware but sometimes you don't get to choose so 
> three questions, 
> if one were to do it with software 

what? a load balancer like, say, what a Cisco Local Director does?

> 1) anyone use this  -> backhand

I'm using it in production currently. Two Sun Ultra 5, with Debian
Sarge, only essential packets installed, with keepalived which via a
single configuration file (that is almost identical between the two
machines) provides population of the machines' IP address table, IPVS
table, and failover. They had Solaris 7 with SunScreen EFS 3.0 installed
previously, but we wanted something that a) could be managed more easily
(modifying a single file is easier than getting thru the admin interface
of EFS _and_ adding IPs via static ARP) and b) was easy to maintain (all
other UNIX production systems are Debians) and c) supported pools of real
servers with content checking and automatic removal of realserver from
the pool).

> 2) what were your opinions

Very good. There are things that can be made better (most important,
synchronization between nodes, which can't be done currently with an
rsync since the files on each node must be different), but the whole
thing is working very well.

> 3) (a) if you use something else what is it?
>    (b) what do you think of it?

see 1) :)

p.
-- 
pbm - "somewhere in these nighlights lies the answer
    -  and you can get diamonds, diamonds by the yard"