Re: BGP / GSLB and HAProxy

We're going through some of the same thinking. BGP looks like a route we may have to take soon as well.

John Marrett wrote:

<snip>

> - What is this nbsrv you refer to? All I can find are references to
> some kind of worm that uses that name?

nbsrv is an option in the haproxy config file that specifies how many haproxy processes to fork. Unless you have special needs, one works fine for almost all loads. The down side of using more than one is that the statistics page only shows stats from the reporting thread, not all of them.

>
> - 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
>

Not sure. I, for one, would like to hear of what's available as well. And so would several thousand of our users.

> - 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?

Same. This would be the holy grail of scalability options for us.

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

We're looking at spread/wackamole (http://www.backhand.org/wackamole/), and Linux High Availability as well.

Spread/wackamole won't do GSLB (so far as I know) but it swaps IPs around, and can effectively do the same function. Having spread installed opens a few more doors for inter-node communication. But I drift off topic.

One of my dream feature requests for Willy is to have Haproxy listen to a unix socket and accept changes to the servers on the fly. Haproxy has a real powerful internal architecture.

Thanks,

-Dan

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Dan Zubey
Sr. Linux Admin
Odysseyware, Inc
http://www.odysseyware.com