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Tudor Davies
Tudor is a techie turned manager who fights like mad to keep his tech skills honed and relevant. Everything from web hosting, networking, *nix and the like. Constantly developing and co-ordinating with others to make the web a better (and easier to use) place.
Friday, 3rd Dec 2010
Posted @ 20:07
So I have a need to do some low impact load balancing for some internal project work and also needed to test a reverse proxy for our portal.
First up was choice of hardware I had available (from our test lab) - either a decent spec Dell server (ranging from 1750s to R200s) or some older hardware. I went for some older kit as none of this is for production but for proof of concept.
So I dug out a SPARCEngine Ultra AXe I had knocking around (ULTRASparc IIi 300MHz) and a SUN Ultra 5 (ULTRASparc IIi 360MHz). Each is equipped with a PCI Quad Fast Ethernet card.
The AXe already had OpenBSD 4.4 installed. So I downloaded the 4.8 bsd.rd, booted into it and did the install. The install went sweetly but when it rebooted I got MMU and other errors. So I connected up a CDROM to install FreeBSD and then it was happy. Must have been a dodgy connection somewhere.
The Ultra 5 was bought as part of a joblot some months back (couple of switches, Ultra 5, Foundry ServerIron XL, Nokia IP530 and some other bits for £35) and was running Solaris 7 and Checkpoint FW-1. This was quickly blasted by installing FreeBSD 8.1.
Both are now running sweetly and I have them installing compiling various ports so they are more useful.
Once Ive done my testing with them, one with become a load balancer for my web servers and the other will become an SSH jump point for remote administration should one of the firewalls go wonky.
Speaking of firewalls, I currently have an IPCop firewall protecting all my gear but also have a Cisco PIX-515 and also a pfSense box (running on a Watchguard Firebox X750e). I might try building a multi-layer firewall setup with web servers, sql server and a SAN protected at different levels. Could be fun :)
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