These tools allow for the control of a cluster of nginx and keepalived hosts. A cluster consists of a master, and one or more backup nodes.

0. Create your load balancer VMs. Install:

• rsync
• ssh
• keepalived
• nginx
• sudo

1. Create a new git repository to hold the configuration for the cluster.

2. Copy the nginx configuration into the git repository. Everything under nginx will be placed in /etc/nginx/ on the load balancer. Note: the nginx config will be rsync'ed with a --delete option.

3. Copy the ssl configuration into the git repostory. This will be overlayed into /etc/ssl. No files will be deleted.

4. Create a keepalived config generator, and commit it to the git repository. A typical example would be:

    cat > gen-keepalived-conf <<EOF
    #!/bin/bash

    index=$1 ; shift
    ipaddr=$1 ; shift

    priority=$(( (index * 1) + 100 ))

    cat <<EOF
    vrrp_script check_health {
        script "/etc/lbc/is-healthy"
        interval 2
        weight 50
        rise 1
        fall 1
    }

    vrrp_instance VI_1 {
        interface eth0

        # We must not preempt if we come back up, and another node
        # is master.
        state BACKUP

        priority $priority
        virtual_router_id 51
        advert_int 1

        authentication {
            auth_type PASS
            auth_pass SOMECOMPLEXPASSWORD
        }

        virtual_ipaddress {
            10.13.0.15
        }

        track_script {
            check_health
        }

        notify "/etc/lbc/notify"
    }
    EOF

5. Specify a configuration:

   • LB_USER The user to SSH to the load balancer hosts as. This user must have "no password" sudo privileges.

   • LB_NAME The name of the load balancer cluster.

   • LB_PACKAGES A list of packages to be installed on load balancer hosts when initialized. This has a sane default. If overridden, rsync, keepalived, and some version of nginx must be included.

6. Run lbc. You will be given the interactive control shell.

7. add each host with associated priority with the add-host $host $priority command, i.e:

    lbc> add-host 10.0.0.15 0
    lbc> add-host 10.0.0.16 1
   

8. For each host, run init-host $hostname.

9. Run status and verify the state of the hosts in the load balancer cluster.

10. Examine the output of help for available commands.