[ale] Does anybody have experience with a load-balancing/failover distro?

[Richard Bronosky]

What you describe is a failover, not a load balancer. If you have 2
good connections it would be a shame not to use them.

On 9/28/10, Michael Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> You should be able to do this with any distribution.  You need only to have:
>   * Setup eth0 with the first connection
>   * Setup eth1 with the second connection
>   * Setup eth2 as the LAN's RFC1918 space and have it answer DHCP and
> do all the "normal" things.
>
> Now, write your iptables rules for Internet-through-eth0 and create a
> modified copy of that for Internet-through-eth1.
>
> Now, keep a file, say, /var/run/active-connection, that has the name
> of the currently active connection in it (either eth0 or eth1).
>
> Have a cron job that, once per minute, pings the gateway address for
> whatever interface is listed in /var/run/active-connection.  If it is
> down, then reconfigure the routing table and IP masquerading for the
> second connection, mark the change in /var/run/active-connection, and
> go from there.
>
> I'd leverage /etc/network/interfaces on Debian and derivatives.  All
> you need to do is hook into that so that "ifdown eth0" and "ifup eth1"
> are all you need, and you should probably have it setup so that you
> cannot "ifup" on both interfaces at the same time, unless you have a
> static IP address from both ISPs.
>
> I haven't gotten around to it yet, but what I would like to do is
> create a little embedded doohickey that will do just this, with three
> Ethernet ports (two in, one out) and a USB port for configuration
> (serial ports don't exist on modern systems anymore, so might as well
> just use a USB port and make it act like a serial port...).  And the
> default configuration of the device would just be for a standard
> network with two standard DHCP-providing ISPs, such that a "completely
> standard" setup would Just Work.  Me being me, I'll probably (when I
> get to it) even have the thing create an IPv6 tunnel and advertise
> IPv6 connectivity, because I just can't see the point of not doing so.
>  :-)
>
>    --- Mike
>
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 12:08 PM, david w. millians <millia at panix.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I've got a district that is getting a second internet connection for
>> redundancy purposes. They would therefore love to have a load balancing
>> and failover appliance. Obviously, there are some vendors that have
>> products to sell them, and also obviously, they cost money that they
>> don't have.
>>
>> A fair number of districts have used "untangle" before, but it appears
>> that they charge for the lb/f capability; it's not included in the free
>> download. It may be cheaper for them since they don't need firewall,
>> filtering, etc., but free is preferred, since even the box to do this is
>> a factor...
>>
>> So, do you know of/have you used any linux distros that do this well and
>> easily? I'm going to go to distrowatch now, but I just want to know of
>> good experiences.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David
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