The concept is simple. When a company has only a single web server, all web traffic goes to that server. This is known as a single point of failure. To fix this problem, investment in multiple servers can help increase capacity to their network. This is where Cybersite Consulting can help you to distribute the traffic in a balanced way that suits your network.

The web-related services that most people use for Internet sites are technologies such as JBoss/J2EE, Tomcat, and Apache in the open source arena. Cybersite provides technical knowledge and experience to help troubleshoot any problems and increase the scalability of your web sites. Load balancing can be done in a number of ways including more traditional round robin DNS, through to more advanced methods including Apache-Tomcat mod_jk communication, JBoss clustering, and Apache proxy methods.

If you are a larger corporation with a multi-national website, then you may be interested in methods of geographical distribution of content. Such techniques were introduced by companies such as Inktomi and Akamai to connect users with Web servers that are closest to them. Companies looking to implement similar technology on Linux and open source can contact Cybersite Consulting to see how we can provide a suitable solution.

A properly designed web cache, by reducing network traffic and improving access times to popular web sites, is a fundamental tool for network administrators and web users alike. Cybersite Consulting is recognised as one of the only consultants in Australia and New Zealand for supporting the Squid Caching Engine. The Squid Cache system is the most popular caching mechanism in use on the Internet.

Cybersite Consulting can help in setting up an appropriate Squid server for caching your network traffic. Areas where our help can benefit you is in authentication and setting up alternate methods such as database-based passwords, LDAP or MS Windows Domain authentication techniques. Other forms of customising the squid box can be implemented including setting up time allocations for certain sites or traffic types, and logging of traffic for appropriate auditing.

One of the most important uses of the caching engines such as Squid is to filter content coming into the workplace. This is done through content filtering mechanisms that can be hooked into Squid. These filters use a combination of site names and ip addresses, keywords, domains and regular expressions to filter out unwanted material. This in combination with advertising filters can help reduce your incoming traffic by as much as 20-40%.

System load balancing is in regards to computer clusters and distributing the workload over the individual machines. This can be seen in many Linux projects such as the Linux Virtual Server, Beowulf cluster projects, UltraMonkey and more. There are two major areas where Cybersite Consulting can help in the area of system load balancing:

1. Fail-over Systems: Avoid having a single point of failure in your system. This means if one part dies, it all dies. Having a fail-over mechanism in place means that the system will keep on functioning as normal, with little or no alteration from the owner or manager. This is the simplest, but often the most important form of load-balancing.

2. Clustering: This is to distribute the load of the service and make it much more scalable. As the workload increases, it is simply a matter of adding more servers with minimal configuration. This allows for a flexible and fault-tolerant system all round.

MySQL 5.x has been successfully installed in a cluster setup for a commercial company. Cybersite is following this project and will monitor performance and reliability for any possible improvements in implementation. This uses the new clustering engine (NDB) rather than the traditional scale-out method of master-slave replication.

If you require help in setting up a cluster, be it MySQL or some other database or software service, give us a call on 1800 1 LINUX.