Hi All,
I have a question regarding iptables and session affinity, which some of you may know as "sticky sessions". I believe for example that the linux virtual server (LVS) project supports load-balancing via NAT with session affinity. What this basically means is that I can have a linux box running LVS sitting in front of (say) 3 web server boxes, and when a new connection comes in, LVS routes it to one box for the entirety of the session - so cookies, session beans under JSP (tomcat) etc are all preserved. With regular round-robin load balancing or similar this is not the case, and plays havoc with session-driven websites as I am sure you all can understand. In LVS, the sticky session load balancing is accessed via the "ipvsadm" command from what I am led to believe. (I think the "-i" option but I am not sure). What I want to know is whether session affinity (sticky session) support is available in iptables? I confess that I haven't used iptables before now (only iphains). If anyone can fill me in, that would be great. I am very anxious to add sticky load balancing support to a server farm without having to either: 1. buy a hardware load balancer eg Cisco 11130, or 2. make more change to my kernel (eg LVS support?) than required. I know that iptables is ready-to-go by default, so if I can do it with this, I will. Assistance/thoughts appreciated. David Peterson -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
