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Date:      22 Mar 1999 12:40:13 -0500
From:      Chris Shenton <chris@shenton.org>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
Cc:        Gary Palmer <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>, Christopher Sedore <cmsedore@maxwell.syr.edu>, "'freebsd-net@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: clustering/load balancing
Message-ID:  <87lngpe83m.fsf@Thanatos.Shenton.Org>
In-Reply-To: Julian Elischer's message of "Mon, 22 Mar 1999 03:10:13 -0800 (PST)"
References:  <Pine.BSF.3.95.990322030819.8498A-100000@current1.whistle.com>

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Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com> 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.


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