Load Balancing

[Michael Jeung]

Hey folks,

We currently use DNS round-robin to balance traffic to servers.   
We've recently run into situations where multiple search engine  
spiders are crawling our webservers.  They appear to be targeting  
specific webservers by IP address.  This defeats DNS round-robin and  
as a result 1 of our webservers starts responding very slowly since  
it's full of search engine spiders.

I recently looked at the port solution "'balance" and it seems like a  
great answer for our problems.  The difficulty I'm running into now  
is that if I put all the webservers behind a single balance server,  
now the webservers are only receiving traffic from the balance server  
and this messes up our traffic reporting tools since it now looks  
like all the traffic is coming from a single IP address.

I'm sure this is a common problem.  Does anyone have a good solution  
to this?  Essentially, I want all the benefits of load-balancing with  
none of the single-IP-traffic drawbacks. =)

Regards,
Michael Jeung