Network Bonding + loadbalancer with persistent connections {$300}
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Hi,
i need some help with a setup for a tomcat application for a music portal. I have setup a two pfsense boxes with version 1.2.2 to load balance http connections to two web servers fairly straightforward. The feature i need is persistent connections or sticky connections. I have ticked the box on the pfsense but it doesn't seem to work. A client connects to the cluster IP and gets directed to server 1 and starts listening to the first track. A session ID gets generated on server 1 which contains the tracks the user listened to last. After a while the session gets redirected to server 2 which of course thinks the client is new and generates a new session ID. So tracks get played twice and the client gets to see the intro again. I assume it's got something to do with the session timeout value. Or the way sticky connections are handled within the load balancer. I think this should be relatively simply to solve if not would it be possible to build a package for the pound load balancer which according to there web site can handle persistent connections http://www.apsis.ch/pound.
The other request is to have the ability to bond both the WAN and LAN connection on the pfsense with 4 network cards. Either with failover or round robin policy. So i can connect the pfsense to a switch stack with two switches.
I hope someone can help me does my offer sound reasonable?
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All you need is on 2.0 snapshots and the interface bonding cannot be backported easily on 1.2 so either try 2.0 and report problems you found and you can pay the amount pledged to me to fix them.
What do you think? -
@ermal:
All you need is on 2.0 snapshots and the interface bonding cannot be backported easily on 1.2 so either try 2.0 and report problems you found and you can pay the amount pledged to me to fix them.
What do you think?Or you could wait two weeks until the hackathon and I'll fix all the relayd bugs in 2.0 for free. Either way, Ermal is 100% correct, this is going to happen on 2.0 only. The sooner it gets tested, the sooner it gets out the door.
–Bill
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Then i suggest you read this http://blog.pfsense.org/?p=383 :)
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Or you could wait two weeks until the hackathon and I'll fix all the relayd bugs in 2.0 for free. Either way, Ermal is 100% correct, this is going to happen on 2.0 only. The sooner it gets tested, the sooner it gets out the door.
That sounds great would you recommend to wait for two weeks until the hackathon is over. Or are there any 2.0 snapshots which are stable enough to use? If not i will wait for the first stable release of 2.0.
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Billm, Ermal, may I?
Wizard, I think what Ermal means is that interface bonding is already a 'working' feature of v2.0A by all means give it a go and if it does what you want then its all good. If there are thing that don't work then by all means create a bounty and this may get it fixed a little more quickly.
Billm will address many of the bug during the hackathon anyway but I'm pretty sure I can speak for them both when I say hackathon or not a v2.0-stable-release is a long way off FAR more than two weeks. I think you're just going to have to make do or bite the bullet and run up a Alpha Snapshot
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I understood that the stable release will not be ready within the next two week. I was just trying to find out what the pfsense developers recommend to do. I don't mind giving one of the Alpha releases a try. But it seams pointless to me if the relayd daemon doesn't work yet which is most important to us because we need to be able to use sticky connections. The two pfsense boxes i am talking about are in front of two web servers serving a music portal in a production environment. So i am a bit reluctant to just upgrade to an Alpha release without any feedback from one of the developers. Perhaps maybe a rough guideline whether to wait till after the hackathon or give one of the Alpha releases a try now or follow ermal's suggestions.
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You should absolutely not consider installing 2.0-alpha into a production environment. So your solutions are limited, either consider different load balancing solution, or pay the necessary freight to have relayd and the 2.0 load balancer backported to the 1.2 branch.
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I wanted to follow up on my request for relayd. At the moment the interface bonding is not all the important for me it would be a nice to have feature. I gave one of the alpha snapshots a test run and i am very impressed with the new web interface and the additional features. Please correct me if i am wrong but it seem likes it's going to be a few months untill we can expect a stable 2.0 release which can be used in a production environment. So if it's an option i would still be willing to pay say 200$ to get a working version of the load balancer (relayd) which can handler persistent connections backported to 1.2. Please let me know if this could be done.
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@ermal:
All you need is on 2.0 snapshots and the interface bonding cannot be backported easily on 1.2 so either try 2.0 and report problems you found and you can pay the amount pledged to me to fix them.
What do you think?I would take you up on your offer as i said in my last post i would be happy to pay 200-300$ to get the load balancer working. I can live without the network bonding at the moment. I don't want to rush you but i need to get this working as soon as possible. It would be great if someone could help me.
