My first thought was some kind of a round robin DNS soultion.  Here are a couple web pages that talk about that:

http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1998/05/engelschall/

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/09/26/load.html

I have used a Foundry load balancer in the past, but is most likely out of your budget.


A quick google search turned up this apache load balancing mod:

http://www.backhand.org/  this mod_backhand sounds cool, has anyone used it?

Here is a page about Load-Balancing with Apache JServ 1.1

http://java.apache.org/jserv/howto.load-balancing.html

The Apache documentation says:

Apache has several modules that allow distribution of requests among servers, for redundancy, increased availability, etc. 

Apache has several modules that allow distribution of requests among servers, for redundancy, increased availability, etc. 

Reverse proxying + mod_rewrite: There is nothing in Apache that you can not do with mod_rewrite ... :) This technique consists of having an Apache front-end server acting as a proxy for the backend servers. You can find more information here 

Mod_redundacy: Takeover web and ip in case of failure. You can find more information here. 

Mod_backhand: Allows seamless redirection of HTTP requests from one web server to another. This redirection can be used to target machines with under-utilized resources, thus providing fine-grained, per-request load balancing of web requests. More information at http://www.backhand.org/. 

You could also try to do some funky stuff with routing or iptables, but the apache mods are probally the best.

Dusty



> 
> Im hoping to use Apache and Tomcat to balance jsp/servlet web
> applications.   What my boss would eventually like is to have cluster of
> linux machines working together to balance load for more than one
> application at the same time.   She mentioned that this is being done at
> the moment on a remote unix machine, we would like something more in
> house.   Although we only have 3 machines at the moment =), i figured it
> would be a good start.  Right now one machine is acting as the firewall
> (and hopefully the load distributer? in the near future).  The other 2
> machines are connected to the firewall and only have Local IP addresses
> 
> -Ronnie
> 
> On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Dusty wrote:
> 
> > What are you trying to load balance?  Please give a little more information about what you want to accomplish.
> >
> > Dusty
> >
> > >
> > > Hi guys, I looked into LVS and I looked through the oreilly load balancing
> > > book and have come to the conclusion that this isnt what Im looking for.
> > > I am started to wonder how difficult it would be to write my own script to
> > > balance load.   Does anyone know of a tutorial or maybe some sort of
> > > textbook which helps a newbie with this sort of thing?
> > >
> > > thanks
> > >
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