Because of the nature of your setup, you cannot have a perfect equal load balance setup. This is because you cannot control the inbound flow of data. If one user makes a request out of line X then the return packet HAS to come back through line X. So, if one guy sends a huge request taking minutes to fulfill, he / she will tie up the line until the job is finished. The load balancer should be smart enough to not send any more requests to that line, but you are still seeing the line being monopolized by this single connection, hence it is not balanced over all lines equally. In order to have fair balancing of all lines, I think you need to set up a deal with your ISP to load balance on their end as well. You could also setup something like BGP to allow multiple routes to the same return address, but I am not familiar enough with BGP to be much help in this area. In all likelihood, you are better off with your current solution or maybe the ISP solution if it is supported by them (more money usually). -----Original Message----- From: Javier Govea [mailto:jgovea@xxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 12:34 PM To: netfilter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Round Robin Load Balancing Hi, I'm trying to do some load balancing with four ppp connections. Here is what i have: a LAN connected to a redhat box which has four ppp interfaces. All the boxes in the LAN are accesing internet through the ppp interfaces in the redhat box. I'm using iproute2, in my redhat box, to setup the the four ppp interfaces as my default out going route (as described in LART http://lartc.org/howto/index.html) and I'm using iptables to masquerade all the traffic comming from the LAN. My setup is working fine, ie. my LAN can access the net throught the four ppp interfaces. My problem is that i don't know how is the load balancing working. Some times one of the ppp interfaces is used more than the others (and that is my problem). According to LART the routes are cached, can someone go a bit into more details in this caching thing??? how does it work? which particular files in the kernel are doing this? I would like to implement a simple round robing algorithm (with no caching) for doing the laod balancing. That is first connection established gose through ppp0, the second connection on ppp1 and so on. I could hack iproute2 and/or iptables, but i'm not sure about which particular files i should hack in order to implement this round robin algorithm. I actually don't know if what i want makes any sense Any ideas or pointers are all very well appreaciated. Thanx to all X
