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

[Eric W. Bates]

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I've seen one commercial product control incoming load-balancing with DNS.

Theoretically if you set the TTL for the RRs down low (I've never gone
shorter than 300 seconds; but I suppose you could go smaller); you could
then 'direct' incoming traffic by providing one IP or the other.  Tools
like bind9-dlz should make it easier to control the zone file dynamically.

In the case of a web page that requires a consistent route during a
session, I don't know of an easy way to control bind response based on
request source.  You can put source configs in named.conf (we do this
for "split-horizon" DNS when you use the same name server to respond to
requests from both inside and outside a NAT). But I don't believe that
aspect is hooked for dynamic control inside the latest version (I could
be wrong).

Can you share your pf config?

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?
> 
> Best Regards,
> Ovidiu
> 
> ps. FreeBSD is the best!
> 
> 
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- --
Eric W. Bates
ericx at vineyard.net
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