pen vs ldirector

Good day!

We are currently using ldirectord plus heartbeat, However I would like to try
another solution and I am looking into pen plus ucarp.

Questions:
1. I'm not that much familiar with our old lvs setup but doing a netstat on
those ldirectors, I see no connection going to the real servers. But in pen
setup, netstat shows that the pen balancer is the one who is actually making
the connection to the real server(it somehow acts as proxy). Now, the clients
network connection using netstat is only with pen. Someone said that the
ldirector doesn't perform the actual request of the client, it only tells the
client on which real server it should forward its request(thus the netstat
shows no output). Am I missing something here? Does this mean all the traffic
will pass through the pen machine? Another thing, how does pen weighs its
connection to determine which server is loaded and which is not? The
ldirector seems like its not based on per connection counts, it only shows
all of the real servers have equal weights.

Lastly, we are going to use pen for squid proxy server balancing on port 3128,
does pen knows how to check the health of this service? Our old setup doesn't
make sense, the real servers are running squid and at the same time, apache.
The ldirector periodically checks the apache if it is running by getting a
test page... however when apache dies, it removes the server in the pool even
if it's squid is still alive. Perhaps the old administrator who configured it
have no idea of what he is doing :-)

Thanks for the time.
Received on Tue Nov 22 2005 - 01:53:31 CET