Load balancing firewall with ubuntu server

[Neal McBurnett]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 09:14:52AM +0200, Soren Hansen wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 09:02:59PM +0200, carlopmart wrote:
> > Somebody knows a good tutorial or howto where explains how to setup a
> > load balancing/failover firewall with ubuntu?? Is it possible to do
> > it?? I need the same funcionalities as carp with pf does
> > (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=carp&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html)
> > but using ubuntu.
> 
> Currently, AFAIK there's no way to share conntrack tables between two
> machines. There will be in Ubuntu's next release (Hardy Heron), based on
> http://www.netfilter.org/projects/conntrack-tools/index.html

I'm no expert in this (!) but I passed it on to Alan Robertson
(architect of the Heartbeat project), who noted another way to deal
with some of the underlying issues that works well for some folks:
Cluster IP (using a single IP address and multicast mac addresses).

It is described in a book that Alan recommends by Karl Kopper that
probably covers other things also related to your interest: "The Linux
Enterprise Cluster: Build a Highly Available Cluster with Commodity
Hardware and Free Software."

See http://www.linux-ha.org/ for some more information from a
"heartbeat" centric viewpoint.  Alan also plans to cover it at
some point in his blog at http://techthoughts.typepad.com/

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/