Ballast: A tool for balancing user load across SSH servers

http://code.nasa.gov/project/balancing-load-across-systems-ballast/

by msantos • 12 years ago

48 16 12 years ago

code.nasa.gov

voltagex_3• 12 years ago

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ballast/files/ - no sign of a VCS, I wonder what they use internally?

nemothekid• 12 years ago

The NASA page claims they use SVN

voltagex_3• 12 years ago

At a guess, it isn't public - http://svn.code.sf.net/p/ballast/code

saltylicorice• 12 years ago

Horrible comma use in the description. You don't need either of 'em!

twic• 12 years ago

So instead of:

Ballast is invoked as part of the SSH login process, hence has access to the user name, which is not available in traditional load balancers

You'd write:

Ballast is invoked as part of the SSH login process hence has access to the user name which is not available in traditional load balancers

I'm afraid i can't agree. Both of those commas seem grammatically necessary to me.

moe• 12 years ago

What an odd idea.

Then again, they send stuff into space. Who am I to judge.

cbhl• 12 years ago

When you have enough users, and NFS homedirs, it makes sense.

The University of Waterloo just uses DNS round-robin, but that's not particularly reliable since the load balancing is up to the whims of each client's DNS client implementation.

And then there's software like mosh[0], which, IIRC, does round-robin on the first connection but then sticks to the same server afterwards so that you can e.g. connect to the same pty even if your local IP changed.

[0] http://mosh.mit.edu/

zokier• 12 years ago

The University of Waterloo just uses DNS round-robin

I take it that they do not allow running persistent applications? I personally would not like to find my screen/tmux session "disappear" after reconnect because I ended to another host.

ngoldbaum• 12 years ago

I guess this is how they manage SSH connection to Pleiades [1]. Cool! I use Pleiades and am constantly impressed by the uptime and quality of service on such a high-end resource.

[1] http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html

mbailey• 12 years ago

Was actually looking at this a few days ago for a cluster of bastion nodes to secured infrastructure. Ts a pretty interesting tool.

aalpbalkan• 12 years ago

Sourceforge? Seriously? Why do NASA people and academia still upload things to SF instead of GitHub?

blueskin_• 12 years ago

From what I've heard from a friend, probably a few thousand forms and layers of approval to change it.

wildpeaks• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why they still use Sourceforge, however they did move some of their projects to Github: https://github.com/nasa

This one even has its own separated account: https://github.com/visionworkbench

Ballast: A tool for balancing user load across SSH servers

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