Of all the experiments in Hands-On Networking this
one was most intimidating to me. It seemed to require a hardware
Web Load Balancer. Purdue has one which I could have used, and
a local contact offered to lend me one, but I could never get my
courage up to try this one out.
Well, it turns out to be easy. We ran Apache on four machines
in our lab. We did the following on a fifth machine:
- go to
Balance
- download balance-3.24.tar.gz
- place that file in a convenient directory
- from that directory type tar xvf balance-3.24.tar.gz
- change directory to the new directory
- type make
- type make install
To run balance just type balance http ip1 ip2 ip3 ip4
You then go to a sixth machine and request a web page that is on your
four web servers, but using the ip address of the machine running
balance. If you keep refreshing or get several machines making
the same request, you can check the logs on your web servers and see
that your requests are being farmed out. Remember that fifth machine
is not running a web server and does not have the page being
requested. Slick!
This site is maintained by W. David Laverell
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at Calvin College. For assistance or corrections,
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