— 2 min read

Pound is a great little load balancer, it’s fast, opensource and supports SSL termination, which is great!

Install

sudo apt-get install pound

Configuration

The default configuration should be pretty good for most purposes, but feel free to tweak as you require.

HTTP

We’ll first look at load balancing HTTP, in case you don’t want or need HTTPS load balancing.

We’ll need delete all the content within ListenHTTP block, once done it should look like this

ListenHTTP
End

Now we add an address and port to listen on and finally a line to remove an HTTP header

ListenHTTP
    Address 0.0.0.0 # all interfaces
    Port 80
    HeadRemove "X-Forwarded-For"
End

This is a basic configuration, for each backend we want to load balance we’ll need to add a service within that listener.

You’ll notice we’re removing incoming headers called X-Forwarded-For, this is to make …

 — < 1 min read

Recently I started using Pound as a load balancer to a cluster of nginx servers and found my access logs were filled with the IP address of the load balancer. I did some digging and found the correct way to “fix” this.

First thing you need to do is make sure you remove X-Forwarded-For from Pound

ListenHTTP
    # ... snip ...
    # ... snip ...
    HeadRemove "X-Forwarded-For"
End

Once this is done, reload Pound.

Next you need nginx compiled with realip module - https://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpRealIpModule

On Ubuntu/Debian servers this module comes by default, otherwise you may have to compile it in yourself using the following option:

--with-http_realip_module

Once this is all done modify your nginx vhosts and add the following 2 lines

set_real_ip_from [IP];
real_ip_header X-Forwarded-For;

Where [IP] is the IP address of your load balancer.

To configure this to work with Apache you need the mod_rpaf module.