I guess part of the question is what is meant by "balanced" with regard to
the non-apache back-end servers that was mentioned?
I am also concerned that the original question brings up the notion of
failover. mod_backhand is not a failover solution. Backhand does have some
facilities to do some failover (eg ByAge weeding) but it's not failover in
the traditional sense. Backhand is for load balance not failover.
While Matt is correct that you could probably write your own load balance
function, the main interesting function in mod_backhand is ByLoad which as
far as I know is Apache specific and relies on the Apache scoreboard (or a
patched version of this)
Non apache servers won't have this scoreboard file although perhaps you
could program your own server(s) to emulate one if it's not mod_backhand.
The other requirement that non-apache servers may have for optimal use with
mod_backhand is that the load balanced servers may need to report
themselves to the main backhand server as one of the important functions is
ByAge to weed out downed servers (and servers too heavily loaded to report
their latest stats).
Otherwise, if you need to load balance a set of non-apache servers evenly
and don't need ByLoad, you could always just use mod_rewrite with the
reverse_proxy/load balancing recipe from Ralf's guide. This solution would
get you up and running fast. But the main immediate downside (other than no
true *load* balancing) is the lack of keep-alive upgrading.
I am also not sure if mod_log_spread has hooks to work with mod_backhand in
particular which would make mod_rewrite load balancing (poor man's load
balancing) less desirable. I suspect mod_log_spread is not
backhand-specific although made by the same group but having not played
with this module yet, I couldn't say for sure.
At 09:24 AM 10/29/00 +0000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
>On Sat, 28 Oct 2000, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> > Is there any way to tie proxy requests mapped by mod_rewrite to
> > a balanced set of servers through mod_backhand (or anything
> > similar)? Also, can mod_backhand (or any alternative) work
> > with non-apache back end servers? I'm really looking for a way
> > to let mod_rewrite do the first cut at deciding where (or whether)
> > to send a request, but then be able to send to a load balanced, fail
> > over set, preferably without having to interpose another physical
> > proxy.
>
> From what I could make out, I think you should be able to use backhand
>only within certain <Location> sections, and therefore have a request come
>in outside of that, rewrite it to a backhand enabled location and have
>backhand do its thing. Should work, but you'd have to try it.
>
>Alternatively write your own decision module for backhand. There's even a
>mod_perl module to do so (although apparently it needs patching for the
>latest version of mod_backhand).
>
>--
><Matt/>
>
> /|| ** Director and CTO **
> //|| ** AxKit.com Ltd ** ** XML Application Serving **
> // || ** http://axkit.org ** ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP **
> // \\| // ** Personal Web Site: http://sergeant.org/ **
> \\//
> //\\
> // \\
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