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Proxy Load Balancing

Goal: To configure a server to load-balanceproxied requests across multiple home servers.

Time: 10-15 minutes

File:

  • etc/raddb/proxy.conf

Diagram:

Fig. Proxy Loadbalance

For this exercise, the users will be divided into the same groups as the previous exercise in Proxy Failover.

User 1 will edit his proxy.conf file, so that the entries for "realm2" are marked as load balancing. The users will send multiple requests to the server for "realm1", and observe how the proxied requests are distributed among the servers for "realm2".

Questions

  1. Why is load balancing useful?

  2. How is load balancing different than fail-over?

  3. What happens to the load balancing when one of the "realm2" servers is stopped, and the server for "realm1" tries to proxy requests to it?

  4. How would this exercise be different if there were more than two home server to load balance to?

  5. If the load balancing home server which has "failed" is started again, will the proxying server ever send requests to it again? If so, when? If not, why not?