Install Pound as Web Load Balancer

One of our website host contents which can be downloaded by clients. Since this content is getting popular, our bandwidth usage and server load are getting higher everyday and we need something to balance this out. To solve this issue, I have using an application called Pound, which is a reverse proxy, load balancer, auto HTTP fail-over and HTTPS front-end for Web server.

The installation and implementation is very simple with help of RPMforge. Pound is open-source software which you can find out more information about it at http://www.apsis.ch/pound/ .

I will use a simple kind of architecture as below:

Lets assume I already have the website hosted in both servers, which I already copied using cPanel copy account tools. Variable as below:

OS: CentOS 5.6 64bit
Website URL: http://download.myinstaller.org/

1. Install RPMforge repository for yum. Go to http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge and choose which CentOS operating system you used. In this case, I will use CentOS 5 64bit packages:

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
$ rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt 
$ rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

2. Install Pound via yum:

$ yum install pound -y

3. Rename original config file because we will use our configuration file:

$ mv /etc/pound.cfg /etc/pound.cfg.ori
$ touch /etc/pound.cfg

4. Copy and paste following configuration into /etc/pound.cfg using text editor:

User            "nobody"
Group           "nobody"
 
LogLevel        1
Alive           2
 
ListenHTTP
        Address 109.169.80.202
        Port    80
End
 
Service
        HeadRequire "Host: .*download.myinstaller.org.*"
 
        BackEnd
                Address 109.169.80.204
                Port    80
		TimeOut 300
        End
 
        BackEnd
                Address 212.24.47.68
                Port 80
		TimeOut 300
        End
 
        Session
                Type Cookie
                ID   "JSESSIONID"
                TTL  300
        End
End

5. Make sure Pound is working at startup service and started:

$ chkconfig pound on
$ service pound start

6. Check whether Pound is listening to the correct value:

$ netstat -tulpn | grep pound
tcp        0      0 109.169.80.202:80               0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      29358/pound

7. To check the log files, you can monitor /var/log/messages using following command:

$ tail -f /var/log/messages

8. Last step is to point the subdomain to the load balancer IP. In this case, I need to login to my domain name server and change the A record for this subdomain. Example as below:

download.myinstaller.org     A      109.169.80.202

After DNS propagation is completed, you should notice that Pound has started to work and balancing your website!

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