web server

How to: Simple load balancer setup for web servers

I finally put together a load balancing setup together this weekend, and I'm surprised it was this easy.

What you'll need is three servers, two web servers and one server for the load balancer. It's not recommended that you only use one load balancer since it's a single point of failure (SPOF) but I only had one extra server on hand. For this tutorial, I used Debian Lenny.

 

First thing's first, download and install pound on your load balancer. 

 

 

New server

Bought some stuff from the Canonical store recently, supposedly it'll take anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks. Awesome.



I took down all my local servers and building one larger one. For the last 8 hours or so, I've been trying to get it to work but no luck. Alright, check this out: Install Debian on HDD. Try to boot => instant restart. Back to the BIOS.

Like WTF?



 

 

Web, log and mail server.

Thought I'd take it upon myself to create a mail server on 'roppie' (me server). It's now a log server also, I even got my router to send logs to it too. Interesting it is though, I have 'jlap' sending all its logs to roppie too. 'roppie' also runs a minimal web server (lighttpd + mysql, same as jlap) but also serves the logs out on HTTP so I can view them anywhere.



  I've been using SFTP on roppie since FTP didn't work for a loooong time. I tried to FTP to it today...and well....proftpd wasn't installed in the first place. So now I have that up and running so its all good.