On 2006/04/20 17:47, Ashley Moran wrote: > pf/CARP might worth a try then. The only issue I have is that it's doing > whole-server load balancing which is no use if just Apache/lighttpd dies. > (I'm more concerned with high-availability than load-balancing.)
You could use a package like monit, or something custom and simpler, to restart the httpd if it crashes. And/or, you could have a simple program checking the backends and if one stops answering, remove it from the rdr pool. > The best alternative I can see is software load balancing on the web servers, > and the most promising I've found so far (in terms of lightweightness and > simplicity) is Pound. You then get to start monitoring Pound rather than httpd :) If you like this route, there's also pen, a general TCP proxy rather than HTTP-specific like Pound; it's probably simpler, doesn't need to link to a threaded OpenSSL library, and is already in packages/ports. Advantages and disadvantages either way... Note that some web browsers will connect to multiple A records before returning an error to the user, and that 'machine up but httpd down' is detected quickly. > From what I read, failover is best provided by > Heartbeat although so far I have only skimmed a few FAQs. There's a program called Heartbeat on Linux that appears to do a similar job to CARP, so I don't think you'd need that here.
