NAME

       fair — simple TCP load balancing service

DESCRIPTION

       fair is a load balancer for TCP connections.  It can be used to distribute incoming connections for SMTP,
       HTTP or any other TCP service to multiple hosts, distributing the load as evenly as possible.

       fair consists of two daemons.  The carrousel is the front-end; it keeps track of back-end hosts and their
       status,  and  forwards  incoming  connections to the back-ends in such a way that the load is distributed
       fairly.  The transponder runs on the back-end hosts, it registers with the carrousel and sends it  status
       information.   The TCP connections forwarded by the carrousel are not sent to the transponder daemons but
       are sent directly to the desired service running on the  back-end  host.  Both  daemons  share  a  single
       configuration file.

EXAMPLES

       The  following  example  shows how to set up fair to service HTTP connections and to distribute them over
       back-ends in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet.

       The configuration file /etc/fair.conf contains the following:

             WorkerService = http
             BalancerService = http
             AllowUDP = ^192.168.1.[0-9]+$

       On www.example.com, the front-end server receiving the incoming HTTP connections, just run:

             carrousel

       On each of the back-ends run:

             transponder www.example.com

SEE ALSO

       carrousel(8), transponder(8), fair.conf(5)

Debian GNU/Linux                                   2005-05-25                                            fair(7)