fair(7) 					       BSD Miscellaneous Information Manual						   fair(7)

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 con-
     nections 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 sub-
     net.

     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						   June 1, 2019 						  Debian GNU/Linux