[LARTC] many ways to do load balancing (or not?)

[Andreas Hasenack <andreas@conectiva.com.br>]

I'm a little confused about the many ways I've read that can be used
for traffic load balancing, that is, two or more interfaces to the
outside world being used transparently and efficiently by the internal
machines.

I heard about:
a) netfilter SNAT to more than one IP. If I'm correct, this is only
a round robin, that is, one connection goes here, the other goes there,
then the next goes here again, etc without much thought.

b) multipath default route. Seems to do something similar, but it "caches"
routes. What exactly does this mean in the long run?

c) multipath default route, but with the equalize option. Again, seems to
work, but the best description I could find about it was something along
the lines of "packet randomization", whatever that means. What does it do
in the long run? Is it better/worse than b)?

d) OSPF. I read in the RFC that OSPF can do "load balancing", but I failed
to understand how (no, I didn't read that RFC thoroughly, it's really high
tech for me at this point). Does it use multipath routes to accomplish this?

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

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