If you’re not familiar with HAProxy, you’re missing out! HAProxy is a very intelligent high-availability reverse proxy that operates all the way up to Layer 7. Unlike Nginx (another good choice), HAProxy is not a webserver, it is designed with only high availability and load balancing in mind. Another great feature is that it’s a lot cheaper than your typical Layer 7 Load Balancer, free :).
There are plenty of good articles out there on HAProxy, but I couldn’t find any Debian/Ubuntu packages for the latest version (1.4.15). The Ubuntu 11.04 repo’s newest version is 1.4.8, but if you want some of the cool new features of 1.4.9-1.4.15, you have to build it from scratch. This process isn’t too painful, but I’ve got a lot of servers to put HAProxy on and I don’t want dpkg / apt-get to freak out and install the old HAProxy in order to satisfy a dependency.
For this reason, I’ve created an Ubuntu 11.04 x64 HAProxy package with TCP Splicing, Full Transparent Proxies and PCRE enabled:
HA-Proxy version 1.4.15 2011/04/08
Copyright 2000-2010 Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
Build options :
TARGET = linux26
CPU = native
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -O2 -march=native -g -fno-strict-aliasing
OPTIONS = USE_LINUX_SPLICE=1 USE_LINUX_TPROXY=1 USE_PCRE=1
Default settings :
maxconn = 2000, bufsize = 16384, maxrewrite = 8192, maxpollevents = 200
Encrypted password support via crypt(3): yes
Available polling systems :
sepoll : pref=400, test result OK
epoll : pref=300, test result OK
poll : pref=200, test result OK
select : pref=150, test result OK
Total: 4 (4 usable), will use sepoll.
Feel free to grab haproxy_1.4.15_amd64.deb (502k SHA1: 8b2ecf05544e0f6531e50bf40261e0b112db61e9)
You can also grab the sources from here: https://www.stevekamerman.com/haproxy/