wl500 as loadbalancer / failover device

[cthings]

Hello forum,

I am investigating the possibilities of using the wl500 as a loadbalancer / failover device. Basic idea is to use a pair of wl500's as a cheap and flexible setup for providing loadbalancing / failover for a (web)server cluster. Currently linux boxes are used to do this, but these are both expensive to replace in case of failure, and doing approx. nothing 99% of the time (load is very low, even with high number of visitors on the websites), so I would prefer to put these in my cluster . Futhermore I would like to have the possibility to connect 2 WAN lines to the routers as a falilover for the connection.

Basic setup I have in mind should be as follows:
- 2 wl500's prob. deluxe version
- both custom kernel
- usb stick or usb hd for additional software and swap
- heartbeat using USB (USB Host-to-Host)
- pound (http://www.apsis.ch/pound/)
- vlan's
- QOS

- Pound (http://www.apsis.ch/pound/ ) has proved to be a very lightweight, stable and easy to configure setup for loadbalancing an failover. Futhermore pound has the ability to keep track of sessions between a client browser and a back-end server, making it an idea replacment for some *very* expensive cisco solutions
Pound currently also offers https wrapping which is very nice but requires OpenSSL. This might be a problem (?)

- Heartbeat
heartbeat should not be a real problem. Using heatbeat I can make sure at least one of the devices is online, removing a singe point of failure. Heartbeat over usb has been implemented succesfully: (http://lists.community.tummy.com/pip...il/001405.html ), but will this work on a wl500?
Did anyone ever try usb host-to-host? if so using what chipset?

- Vlans:
Oleg wrote a insightfull post on how vlans are working in a wl500 deluxe. I am wondering if I can configure a wl500 to set up 2 WAN ports for multiple connections using eg cron to determine if these are up and switch routing if needed.

Well, if any one of you has some ideas or comments please feel free.

regards,
Cthings

[Oleg]

Consider using OpenWRT if you want to configure device for something different, than provided in hte stock firmware.

[Yusaku]

routing between two vlans on wl500dx, iptables cleared:

OpenWRT (white russian) - 2600kB/sec
Oleg modified (latest) - 3600kB/sec.

There seems to still be few things to debug there...