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Date:      Thu, 11 May 2000 11:19:46 +0200
From:      Alexander Langer <alex@big.endian.de>
To:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject:   load-balancing over routes and redundancy
Message-ID:  <20000511111946.A5785@cichlids.cichlids.com>

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Hello!

I wanted to ask if we have some kind of route-balancing stuff in the
tree/kernel?

Why I ask: Tonight, when I couldn't sleep (I have the best ideas in
those situations), I had the following idea:

- load balancing over routes.
  That is something, which is defenitely needed. For example, for
  web-server clusters you could filter out incoming SYN-flags for ONE
  IP (the router-machine) and then the router balances the load to a
  given cluster of private-addressed webservers, i.e. 10.0.0.0/8 or
  192.168.0.0/16 machines or something. That needs dynamic
  route-handling. Question is: Will this be faster?

The next concept, which belongs the above, is _much_ more interesting:
It provides redundancy:
Imagagine the following: You have three webservers behind that router.
One crashes. Two are left.
Now, the router could be used to ping the webservers every second or
every 5 seconds or whatever. If the webserver doesn't response, it is
supposed to have crashed or be under a too high load, and it is 
left out with the forwarding of the SYN-flags.

That provides completely transparency. This is so nice, I love my
concept. :-) You even can add more webservers without adding more IPs
and other stuff.

Comments? Is this worse to write?
In my eyes, this could be a kernel-module with a frontend in
userspace, e.g. loadcontrol(8).
Then, when you add new machines, you do something like loadcontrol
addmachine 192.168.0.23 80,12345
to add the machine to the cluster for the given ports 80 and 12345.

Note: This are just thoughts that I had tonight. It can even be that
such things already exist (or are implimented similar/better in the
kernel/userland already)

Alex
-- 
I need a new ~/.sig.


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