Failverse

Server security is one of those topics that there’s a lot of different opinions flying around. How secure do you want to be? It really comes down to how much you want to inconvenience your users (and yourself). While there are many different ways to secure a server, this article focuses on an implementation of something I think is a nice cross between convenience and security. For a more in depth view on server security, I would recommend looking at Racker Hacker’s Blog.

However this post is for configuring ppp-pam.

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Why use Load Balancing?

This is an article about setting up a load balancer, so if you’re here it’s probably because you want to set one up. So I’ll keep this section relatively brief. A load balancer is a piece of hardware that accepts incoming traffic and then passes it through to other servers on the backend, this allows you to scale your infrastructure easily with little downtime simply by adding more servers into it. The main benefit of load balancing is distributing the load across multiple servers to make the site run quickly, even when there are a large volume of concurrent connections. This article will be about setting up a software based solution using HA Proxy, this allows you to use a server as a load balancer useful if your in a virtual environment such as the Rackspace Cloud where you can’t have hardware load balancers.

This article assumes you have already set up your apache nodes, and are familiar with using SSH and Linux.

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