Standard Kernel builds of LVS (Linux Vitual Server) don’t have the ability to load balance traffic that is from the local node.
For example if you terminated some SSL traffic using stunnel or pound on the load balancer you then wouldn’t be able to forward that traffic to a backend real server through LVS.

First many thanks to Siim Põder for helping to port Carlos Lozano’s patch from 2.4 -> 2.6
In order to run an SSL reverse proxy on the same node that is running LVS
i.e.

External client —> pound:443 –> Local:443 —> IPVS:80 —> RealServer

The patch for Linux Kernel 2.6.25 is here:
http://www.loadbalancer.org/download/patches/ip_vs_locallvs.patch

The following is a guide how to install on Centos 5.1:
(more…)

I’m going on holiday next week to a villa in Spain with the extended family. I’ll take my Blackberry & laptop with Ubuntu and a 3G card because I’m one of those sad people who like to stay in touch with the office… But I’d also like to use the laptop for my 6 year old son to watch DVDs on the plane, now thats all very well but the DVD drains the battery pretty quick and the reliability is pretty awful. So I thought no problem I’ll just rip the DVDs into ogg movie files.

Now I haven’t used any DVDs in Hardy 64 bit (only 32bit which worked fine) but I instantly hit a problem, after being automatically prompted to install the illegal gstreamer library (nice feature that auto prompt) Totem refused to play ball with the DVD:

“An error occurred Could not read from resource”

(more…)

One of the (many) traditional problems with load balancing is the requirement to change your infrastructure in order to implement a hardware load balancer. Traditional DNS based round robin was easy as you just added extra IP addresses to your A record, but when using a hardware load balancer you need to get it between your clients and your servers. Some of the original units such as the CISCO 416 local re-director could be used in ‘bridge mode’ where traffic was physically forced to pass through the load balancer hardware and the packets were changed on the fly. Although this was fairly transparent it introduced a single point of failure in the load balancer unit. Most recent load balancer hardware is configured in NAT mode (like a firewall) where traffic is translated from an external subnet to an internal one while carrying out the load balancing of packets.

(more…)