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Date:      Wed, 7 Oct 1998 10:44:20 +0100 (BST)
From:      Karl Pielorz <kpielorz@tdx.co.uk>
To:        Manar Hussain <manar@ivision.co.uk>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: IP Load balancing
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9810071039550.4671-100000@caladan.tdx.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19981006222923.009d2330@stingray.ivision.co.uk>

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On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Manar Hussain wrote:

> The really cute way to do this is with a layer 4 switch ... something like
> an alteon @10k odd + so it needs to be a serious solution requirement. The
> switch itself has the ip address that is publically accessed and behind it
> sits a network with it's on set of ip addresses etc. The switch farms out
> the traffic as required in a pretty clever way, including tracking
> sessions, having load balancing ruels, making sure the servers are up with
> both pings and response checks on port 80 blah blah.
> 
> Something a few people do that's also useful is to have the site
> set-up/configured on two servers but only running on one with requests
> coming in on a virtual interface. If this server goes down you have systems
> in place to bring that ip address up on your back up server and things
> start to work again with very little down time.
> 
> Variations are possible of course ...

Hi,

I actually started working on something like this in house, the idea was
to have a FreeBSD box (possibly running PicoBSD) sitting as our front
router...

It then 'accepts' all incoming requests for Web, SMTP, POP3 etc. - and
maintains a list of 'known' working servers, and will forward the connect
to each server depending on a set of rules...

Servers are checked to be active / up before the connection is accepted /
forwarded, so that in theory the end user uses only 1 IP and see's 100%
uptime...

I've finished the first part of this, which is a 'dummy' POP3 server that
will accept and authenticate _anybody_ and just tell them they don't have
any new mail - this is the 'fallback' server, i.e. if all our POP3 servers
are down the user gets DummyPop instead... Cruel, but it works ;-)

If I get a chance I'll get the details written up and on the web...

Regards,

Karl Pielorz


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