BGP / GSLB and HAProxy

I'm working on a project to replace a commerical load balancing solution with a solution based on a number of open source components, including HAProxy. One of the features of the current solution is basic GSLB functionality, which permits intra site health checking and the modification of DNS responses based on site availability. We have a number of front end sites that feed into our back end systems.

In the recent announcement of 1.3.14 Willy mentioned

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• add "fail" condition to "monitor" request. It's possible to return 503 instead of 200 if the condition is met. With this, we could make the service's IP address disappear in a BGP table when too many servers were down (using nbsrv). This is very useful to build multi-site architectures.

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I'm very interested in this subject. A few questions:

• What is this nbsrv you refer to? All I can find are references to some kind of worm that uses that name?
• Are there existing open source tools that will allow me to handle intra site health checking and DNS updates? Our current plans are rolling a perl script and using dynamic DNS to update DNS information
• Currently we aren't quite ready for it, but it would be very interesting to take BGP information, and use it to refer customers to the closest site, any ideas on this subject?

Any advice that can be provided on the subject of open source tools and GSLB will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for your help, and for a great tool,

-JohnF Received on 2007/12/18 16:25