Book Image

Linux for Networking Professionals

By : Rob VandenBrink
1 (1)
Book Image

Linux for Networking Professionals

1 (1)
By: Rob VandenBrink

Overview of this book

As Linux continues to gain prominence, there has been a rise in network services being deployed on Linux for cost and flexibility reasons. If you are a networking professional or an infrastructure engineer involved with networks, extensive knowledge of Linux networking is a must. This book will guide you in building a strong foundation of Linux networking concepts. The book begins by covering various major distributions, how to pick the right distro, and basic Linux network configurations. You'll then move on to Linux network diagnostics, setting up a Linux firewall, and using Linux as a host for network services. You'll discover a wide range of network services, why they're important, and how to configure them in an enterprise environment. Finally, as you work with the example builds in this Linux book, you'll learn to configure various services to defend against common attacks. As you advance to the final chapters, you’ll be well on your way towards building the underpinnings for an all-Linux datacenter. By the end of this book, you'll be able to not only configure common Linux network services confidently, but also use tried-and-tested methodologies for future Linux installations.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Linux Basics
4
Section 2: Linux as a Network Node and Troubleshooting Platform
8
Section 3: Linux Network Services

Chapter 10: Load Balancer Services for Linux

In this chapter, we'll be discussing the load balancer services that are available for Linux, specifically HAProxy. Load balancers allow client workloads to be spread across multiple backend servers. This allows a single IP to scale larger than a single server may allow, and also allows for redundancy in the case of a server outage or maintenance window.

Once you've completed these examples, you should have the skills to deploy Linux-based load balancer services in your own environment via several different methods.

In particular, we'll cover the following topics:

  • Introduction to load balancing
  • Load balancing algorithms
  • Server and service health checks
  • Datacenter load balancer design considerations
  • Building a HAProxy NAT/proxy load balancer
  • A final note on load balancer security

Because of the complexity of setting up the infrastructure for this section, there are a few choices...