From: John P. Looney (john at domain antefacto.com)
Date: Thu 25 Oct 2001 - 10:34:02 IST
On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 10:28:47AM -0400, AJ McKee mentioned:
> Hi all,
>
> Hope everyone is well.
>
> OK I was wondering what are the alternative to round robin DNS as a method of
> load balancing a web server. I have done a nice google and the results all
> seem to be indicating a third party "box".
>
> However is there any open source or method of configuring linux to act as a
> cluster management server and hece forward all request between various
> machines with different operating systems but all running web servers?
There certainly are many ways of doing it. Us at antefacto sell a really
cute box, based around linux & various open source software tools to do
load balancing (and a few other things besides). Checkout the website.
However, if you don't have the budget, and have the time on your hands,
you can look at www.linuxvirtualserver.org, where you can download the
"ipvs" patches to linux. This will allow you to setup a linux box as a
load balancer. However, it should be pointed out that this software can't
be installed on the webservers themselves - you need a dedicated machine
to be between the service users, and the servers.
You need a "monitoring" application to pool webservers ever few seconds,
to make sure that they are still alive (and worth forwarding requests
onto). I think www.linuxvirtualserver.org recommends "mon" (we thought it
was cack, and wrote our own).
I've had no problem load balancing between a windows machine running IIS
or apache, and a linux/apache box.
John
-- _______________________________________ John Looney Chief Scientist a n t e f a c t o t: +353 1 8586004 www.antefacto.com f: +353 1 8586014
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