Load Balancing - Nice and Easy - no BGP, no isp help.

[Eric Anderson]

Ovidiu Ene wrote:
> Hello friends
> 
> I am trying for a while to make a load balancer under FreeBSD. No BGP 
> support from isps!
> 
> 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?

I'm wondering if there is a way to do something like this with ipnat. 
If not, it might be a good place to toss something like this - just send 
new connection requests through alternating interfaces..

Eric


-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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