Richard Wilson wrote:
Hulloo list,
Can anyone recommend a load balancer for http/https for OpenBSD?
Currently I'm using Pound, from http://www.apsis.ch/pound/ which runs
under OpenBSD, and supports connection tracking via IP, cookie and
request ID (eg PHPSESSID) and seems to do everything I need.
pf: see pf(4) pf.conf(5) pfctl(8) pfsync(4)
It can balance using round-robin, random, and source-hash. Stickiness
can be applied to the round-robin and random methods. The stickiness
option and source-hash method will satisfy https, and http if you are
not sharing session data among servers.
Best of all, pf is is built right in and simple as hell to use. All you
need to do is config your existing firewall or put a pf box in front of
your webservers. Hell, you could probably even run it on all of your
webservers in a carp group (haven't done this, but seems feasible).
Added bonus, pf inherently balances other services, not just http! Oh,
another bonus, you can easily have automatic fail-over using pfsync and
carp! I'm not sure you can beat the simplicity and robustness of pf.
As far as I'm concerned, pf obsoleted all load balancers for me. I used
to use pen to balance http traffic. Because of pen's design, there were
discrepancies in the web logs, where all connections, from the
webservers POV, were coming from the pen load balancer. So there was an
add on program, a hack, that was needed to later resolve web logs. It
worked well, but what a mess. I would like to hear why people would not
desire pf over some other load balancing option.
-pachl
