Re: [LARTC] load balancing and failover

[Manish Kathuria <manish@tuxspace.com>]

Payal Rathod wrote:
> Hi,
> A friend of mine has 2 lines of 512kbps terminated in two Linux boxes.  
> He now want to remove those 2 boxes and have some device which will 
> loadbalance the two ISPs and also have a failover arrangement. But he 
> has agreed to give me a chance to do it on Linux for my own 
> satisfication.
> Is this easy to do with lartc? How do I go about it exactly?  I have 
> very less time to do it since his whole network will be done for that 
> time and I cannot afford to play for long time. Is it worth trying it 
> with lartc for academic sake atleast?
> Can someone suggest some easy steps?
> With warm regards,
> -Payal
> p.s. Is lartc.org down?

You can try out implementing configuring a load balancing and failover 
system referring to the following documents:

http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/nano.txt
http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/dgd-usage.txt

You will need to patch and recompile the linux kernel using the "routes" 
patch given at http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/#routes for dead gateway detection 
to work.

The load balancing part works fine but dead gateway detection (and hence 
failover) does not work always. It works best when your first hop 
gateway is down but may or may not work when a subsequent hop is down. 
In a recent case, I observed that dead gateway detection and the 
failover was working very well when one ISP failed but did not happen 
when the other one went down. So you can try your luck here.

--
Manish Kathuria
http://www.tuxspace.com/


_______________________________________________
LARTC mailing list
LARTC@mailman.ds9a.nl
http://mailman.ds9a.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lartc