Douglas E. Comer


Computer Science Department
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907

webmaster: W. David Laverell


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Hands-On Networking: Experiment 16.3 Home > Student > Experiments > 16.3

Experiment 16.3

Chapter 16
16.1 16.2
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:

  1. go to Balance
  2. download balance-3.24.tar.gz
  3. place that file in a convenient directory
  4. from that directory type tar xvf balance-3.24.tar.gz
  5. change directory to the new directory
  6. type make
  7. 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!



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