From owner-freebsd-net Mon Mar 22 9:34:44 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from Thanatos.Shenton.Org (Thanatos.Shenton.Org [209.31.147.195]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 761A114BD5; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:34:24 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from chris@shenton.org) Received: (from chris@localhost) by Thanatos.Shenton.Org (8.9.2/8.9.2) id MAA25174; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 12:40:16 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from chris) To: Julian Elischer Cc: Gary Palmer , Christopher Sedore , "'freebsd-net@freebsd.org'" Subject: Re: clustering/load balancing References: From: Chris Shenton Date: 22 Mar 1999 12:40:13 -0500 In-Reply-To: Julian Elischer's message of "Mon, 22 Mar 1999 03:10:13 -0800 (PST)" Message-ID: <87lngpe83m.fsf@Thanatos.Shenton.Org> Lines: 28 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.6.45/Emacs 20.3 Sender: owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Julian Elischer writes: > I was just giving an example of load sharing using exisiting code. > I probably wouldn't have A actually doing work, that way it'd be a > hell of a lot more reliable, and hey, a PC is cheap..have another on > standby. I've missed the origin o the thread so feel free to ignore me if I'm missing the point. I don't like manual fail-over and unused hardware waiting for the "real" server to die. At a number of sites, I've used boxes from RND Networks (www.rndnetworks.com) to do server load sharing/balancing. If you use them singly, it looks like the single point o' failure diagram posted here. But you can use them in pairs which test each other for upness and if one goes belly-up the other assumes its IP and MAC so no other machines notice. These are pricey, too pricey IMHO, but so is the competition; Acuitive.com has an interesting review of the technology and products if you're interested. The Ericsson folks have released open source software to do something very similar using a load-balancing DNS server, IP migration, intelligent HTTP gateway, and there's talk of content replication. They say it's in Beta for Linux :-( but have plans to release a Solaris version; would be nice to see it run on FreeBSD. I haven't played with it yet but it looks way cool. It's at www.eddieware.org. If anyone's used it, I'd be interested in a report. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message