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Date:      Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:34:35 +0300
From:      Ovidiu Ene <ovidiue@unixware.ro>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Load Balancing - Nice and Easy - no BGP, no isp help.
Message-ID:  <4305B5BB.90705@unixware.ro>

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Hello friends

I am trying for a while to make a load balancer under FreeBSD

I would have: 3 nics, ISP1 nic, ISP2 nic and LAN nic.
What i've done until now, after reading lots of posts, googling for a while:

- I've suceeded to setup an outgoing load balancer with pf, it works 
perfectly but only for outgoing traffic;
- I've noticed that almost everybody thing that it cannot be done load 
balancing with BSD of incoming and outgoing without help of that both 
ISP (BGP)
- I find hardware with proprietary OS/firmware that can do load 
balancing without support of ISP. Some are cheap (300$), but at review 
does not know to load balance incoming traffic (break functionality of 
some pages accessed, since some of load is on one interface, some of 
other, works corectly only if i setup to come some type of traffic on 
one interface, some of other (for example trafic via port 80 on one nic, 
ftp traffic on the other), also are expensive hardware load balancers 
(over 1000$) that... i am asking myself how it works, without help of isp.
- I've found somewhere that it can be done load balancing but not with 
one box with that 3 nics, but with 3 boxex, because (that article i am 
"insipring" said that every box has just one routing table) because can 
be created a virtual server that with handle routes from that 2 boxes.
- People told me that in Linux load balancing cand be done, 3 nics, 2 
external, one to Lan, with iptables. Here is a short article:
http://linux.com.lb/wiki/index.pl?node=Load%20Balancing%20Across%20Multiple%20Links

So, my question is, if some people made it (in expensive hardware that 
did have the same OS, maybe even FreeBSD, and proprietary algorythms) 
and in Linux it can be done (people told me, i've read articles and also 
so it here, where i live) why it cannot be done under FreeBSD?
I guess it can be done, I want to do it with FreeBSD, and want to obtain 
same performances as with Linux.

What is your opinion about that? What should I do? Anybody suceed in 
making load balancing work that way?

Best Regards,
Ovidiu

ps. FreeBSD is the best!





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