Hi there...

I have a network of 3 servers(LTSP servers)... one of which acts as the DHCP server for the network.

The clients are diskless machines(Thin Clients).

The IP address of the 3 servers are as follows..
192.168.14.1(DHCP+LTSP server)
192.168.14.193(LTSP server)
192.168.15.1(LTSP server)
I'm using ltsp4.2 and openSuSE10.2 on the servers.
Its a Class C network.

Please guide me on how to load balance between these 3 servers(HTTP requests as well as requests for running of softwares by clients).

I tried using Balance NG but cant figure out how to write the bng.conf file.

Also, is there an inbuilt load balancing feature provided by ltsp?

Can Linux Virtual Servers be of any help?? please tell me how to use it if possible.

An easy solution may be to just setup a DNS A records for each ip address pointing to one name.

Then use that dns name in the root path on the dhcp server and any where else where you specify the address of the LTSP server.

Make sense?

thanx .... but could u please tell me the exact procedure?

We don't do other people's homework.

And why not?!


Anyway,
I'm not 100% sure but I think the dns way involves starting with a domain name (example.com) and then in the dns config you have it resolve to more than 1 IP address. So then it will kind of round robin the requests. But then you have the problem of trying to keep all the servers in sync with each other.


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...22&btnG=Search

The DNS solution could work if your goal is just to balance the HTTP requests. For load balancing the DHCP server you would need something like the Linux HA project to detect when a server went down and replace it with a different DHCP server.

dnsmasq is an easy to configure DNS and DHCP server:
http://www.novell.com/products/linux...x/dnsmasq.html

Since it sounds like you already have a DHCP server modify /etc/dnsmasq.conf to disable dhcp on your network card:
no-dhcp-interface=eth0

Then add these entries to your /etc/hosts file on the DHCP/DNS server:
192.168.14.1 myltspserver.local
192.168.14.193 myltspserver.local
192.168.15.1 myltspserver.local

If your DHCP server is configured to have the leases use 192.168.14.1 as your DNS server (which it is now a DNS server with dnsmasq), running "host myltspserver.local" should now return the addresses of all three of the HTTP servers. Using myltspserver.local as the hostname for any HTTP service you want load balanced should now work.

thanx a lot... can u tell me about installing openmosix on the servers?(same network configuration).

I am not very familiar with openmosix. Do you want these computers to function as general purpose desktop type computers part of the day and then an openmosix cluster the rest of the time? This may be somewhat tricky since you may have to compile your own kernel with openmosix to get it to work with a distribution that has all the other applications you want.


I have played around with openmosix a little bit using a live cd:

http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/ins..._clusters.html

If you just have a common application or one special program you want to run on a bunch of computers that are semi dedicated to the cluster then the live CD is a very easy way to go. Some of the live CD distros will be do netbooting for you.