Overloading LoadBalance??

Shredder · Dec 14, 2009, 6:06 PM

I have a client on 1.2.3-RC3 setup with the load balancer.

They have 2 outside IP addresses. I use OpenDNS for the DNS servers. I am using just the loadbalancer, having the ping addresses set to the 2 OpenDNS servers.

Seems that as the day progresses, the loadbalancer seems to fail (probably not a good term to use for it). What happens is, that webpages tend to load sporadically. Hitting refresh will eventually get the page(s) to load. If I split up the traffic and force some users out ISP 1 and some out ISP 2, it works fine.

I have no rules in place for DNS, and am wondering if this might be the issue. Looking at the Static Route page in pfSense, Do I set the route as a LAN route or a route per ISP? Would it make sense to maybe install tinydns on the firewall for a DNS caching system to maybe help with this?

I don't know for sure if it is a DNS issue as the only way to get this condition is to have the office work and eventually it will fail. Not really good for productivity.

There are about 50 users in the office. I have pfSense built on a Core 2 Duo machine to make sure I wasn't overloading pfSense. I have watched the bandwidth usage of pfSense to see if any user might be using a lot of bandwidth, but nothing stands out.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Shredder

Perry · Dec 14, 2009, 6:25 PM

It's not a DNS problem. http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN_and_Compatibility#Web_site_incompatibility_with_changing_IP_addresses

So it will work much better if you split the users with failover pools.

Shredder · Dec 14, 2009, 7:52 PM

Sorry, should have said it was fo normal http: addresses. ie Google.

Can someone tell me how to set up the DNS rules for load balancing. At least I can try that and see if it might work.

Thanks,
Shredder

vsMax · Dec 18, 2009, 8:04 AM

@Shredder:

Sorry, should have said it was fo normal http: addresses. ie Google.

Can someone tell me how to set up the DNS rules for load balancing. At least I can try that and see if it might work.

Thanks,
Shredder

The same happens to me!
But I'm not sure it's a DNS issue: when this hangup happens to me if I do a ping to an "unchecked" site (a site I know but I haven't checked recently) reverse lookup of the address is done and I get numerical IP but I'm unable to contact the site.

At the moment the only "solution" I've found is to use just one connection and shut down the WAN2 modem.