[LON-CAPA-admin] Optimum Load Balancing

[Abdel Messeh, Maged]

Hi All,

I have recently successfully deployed a lon-balancer in our test environment which works great, however in order to completely benefit from it, I am looking for a way to redirect users to the balancer when they try to go directly to an access node.  In other words I do not want users to be able to go to a specific access node and potentially overload it.

I tried to use apache redirects (mod_rewrite) to accomplish this but I ended up creating a loop in the folloing fashion:
User goes to accesstest1 --> apache redirect to lon-balance --> lon-balance redirect to accestest2 --> apache redirect to lon-balance 

I am not sure if there is a better way for doing this?  I am also open for using external layer of redirects via nginx for exmaple.

A more ambitious solution would be to completely hide which access node the user is on, and hence they cannot go directly to any access node and then see if lon-balancer can redirect users for each request rather than on initial logins only.

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts on any of the above ideas.

Thanks,

Maged