Free load balancing software for linux

Crossroads is a load balance and failover utility for TCP-based services.
Crossroads Load Balancer is a daemon program running in userspace and features extensive configurability, polling of backends using "wakeup calls", detailed status reporting, "hooks" for special actions when backend calls fail, and more.
It is service-independent; it is usable for HTTP(S), SSH, SMTP, DNS, etc.
Crossroads is a daemon that basically accepts TCP connections at preconfigured ports, and given a list of back ends distributes each incoming connection, so that a client process is served.
Additionally, crossroads maintains an internal administration of the back end connectivity: if a back end isnt usable, then the client request is handled using another back end. Crossroads will then periodically check whether a previously not usable back end has come to life yet. Also, crossroads can select back ends by estimating the load, so that balancing is achieved.
Using this approach, crossroads serves as load balancer and fail over utility. Crossroads will very likely not be as reliable as hardware based balancers, since it always will require a server to run on. This server, in turn, may become a new Single Point of Failure (SPOS). However, in situations where cost efficiency is an issue, crossroads may be a good choice.
Furthermore, crossroads can be deployed in situations where a hardware based balancing already exists and augmenting service reliability is needed. Or, crossroads may be run off a diskless system, which again improves reliability of the underlying hardware.
This document describes how to use crossroads, how to configure it in order to increase the reliability of your systems, and how to compile the program from its sources. This document is also available in PDF format.
Usage:
Crossroads is started from the commandline, and highly depends on /etc/crossroads.conf (the default configuration file). It supports a number of flags (e.g., to overrule the location of the configuration file). The actual usage information is always obtained by typing crossroads without any arguments. Crossroads then displays the allowed arguments.
This section shows the basic usage.
- crossroads start and crossroads stop are typical actions that are run from system startup scripts. The meaning is self-explanatory.
- crossroad status reports on each running service. Per service, the state of each back end is reported.
- crossroads tell service backend state is a command line way of telling crossroads that a given back end, of a given service, is in a given state. Normally crossroads maintains state information itself, but by using crossroads tell, a back end can be e.g. taken off line for servicing.
- crossroads services reports on the configured services. In contrast to crossroads status, this option only shows whats configured -- not whats up and running. Therefore, crossroads services doesnt report on back end states.
- crossroads sampleconf shows a sample configuration on screen. A good way of quicky viewing the configuration file syntax, or of getting a start for your own configuration /etc/crossroads.conf.

load-plugins provides kicker cpuload and memory load plugins.
To install:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ copy inst/*.desktop $KDEDIR/share/apps/kicker/applets
$ copy src/*.la $KDEDIR/lib/kde3
$ copy src/.lib/*.so $KDEDIR/lib/kde3
$ copy inst/*rc $KDEHOME/share/config
Enhancements:
- fixed bug with applet background color
- support added for kicker with tiled background image

Load .pls playlists in MPD is a service menu for KDE that can load one or several ".pls" files (playlists) into current MPDs playlist.
If your version of MPD supports it, this works for playlists containing URLs as well, such as the ones that can be found on Shoutcast.
The program "mpc" is required for this to work.
The file is to be put in ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/.
Enhancements:
- Can now load several playlists at a time
- Added 2 actions: play now, play after current song
- Now the actions are in their own submenu

GIMP ASCII Load/Save Plugin package is a set of identical plugins Save 2 ASCII, and ASCII 2 Image, which make saving (loading) images to (from) ASCII text.

GIMP ASCII Load/Save Plugin is very useful if you are using GNU Octave & GIMP together for Image processing. These plugins are distributed under GNU GPL, which you may modify and redistribute.

ASCII 2

Functionally this script tries to create an Image from a text-file that had been processed with the Octave or anything else.

LIMITATIONS: No support for multiple-layers or alpha.

USAGE: Choose a given ASCII file which you want to visualize, and with a knowledge of its column size & row size type those in and select gray/color option, then press ok and wait. You must see your matrix visualized on GIMP.

Save 2 ASCII

Functionally this script tries to save the Image into a text-file for processing with the Octave or anything else.

LIMITATIONS; Cannot save layers.

USAGE: Choose an image, and select if you want it saved as a ASCII file in gray/color mode (1bit-per-pixel(bpp) or 3bpp), and press ok. A new file will be created in your $HOME directory by default, or the directory where you started GIMP from. You can optionally override this by specifying the full path in filename field.

vcs-load-dirs is a tool to automate and simplify the loading of software into version control systems. The project is designed primarily for importing from a non-version-controlled upstream, such as processing release tarballs.
While a bit of scripting can help some version control systems achieve a basic version of this, vcs-load-dirs often does better than that, especially concerning renames.
vcs-load-dirs is a Free Software project licensed under the GNU General Public License. You can download it for free, and you can modify it. In fact, you are encouraged to contribute to vcs-load-dirs, and doing so is fast and easy.
vcs-load-dirs is written in pure Python and has been known to work on various versions of Linux and BSD. It was written primarily in response to Subversions svn_load_dirs, which was tied to Subversions internals and not portable to other VCSs.
Main features:
- When a given import directory represents only adds or only deletes from the tree in version control, vcs-load-dirs automatically issues the needed add/delete commands to tell the VCS what happened.
- When an import directory represents both adds or deletes, vcs-load-dirs realizes that, rather than a bunch of discrete adds and deletes, there may be files that were renamed. It enters an interactive mode, showing deleted and added files, and lets you match them up if you believe any were renamed. You can optionally skip this step if you dont want your VCS to track the renames. vcs-load-dirs will inform your VCS about renames, adds, and deletes.
Enhancements:
- Support for Mercurial was added.
- Minor fixes were made.
- A new Web site was made.

Lokiwall provides an easily manageable Linux firewall with some unique features.
Lokiwall is a firewall script for Linux. In addition to the standard function of easily limiting network traffic, it features dual routing (using two Internet connections simultaniously), connection fail-over, load balancing, traffic control, advanced masquerading, advanced DNAT, and advanced marking (to direct specific traffic to a certain interface).
The advanced features require some kernel patches. The standard features will work on a default Linux system with iptables and iproute2.
In addition to the standard features every firewall should have, this firewall has the following extras:
- Dual routing (Dual Routing gives you the ability to use two internet connections simultaniously)
- Fail Over (When one of two internet connections goes down, the other takes over the full load)
- Load Balancing (When using two internetconnections the slower one will get less traffic)
- Traffic Control (Traffic control is not yet functional in version 0.1)