ok, friend of mine has two servers at rackshack, he wants to load balance the both of these systems, and obviously being at rackshack there is no way to do it hardware based, so i was wondering if there were any reliable software based load balancing solutions for linux? is this even possible?


thanks

You would probebly need another machine to do the load balancing. If you want something fancy like checking load avarage or bandwidth usage. check out
http://www.f5.com

If you just want simple balancing you can consider using DNS round robin technic.

There are a few things you can do with DNS to achieve a "quasi" load balancing. Tell us more about what you are trying to accomplish and maybe PM me a url and I wll make a suggestion or 2.

Round Robin DNS will alternate requests for a domain name to multiple ip addresses. Mind you this only evenly distributes the requests across the servers, it doesn't take into account the CPU load on the server or any other performance counters. It just makes sure both servers get even numbers of requests.

The best thing to use is LVS and it is free. Check out http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org I have used it in several applications and it works well, it is also much more cost effective than spending 30 or 40k for F5 gear.