

Ballast: A tool for balancing user load across SSH servers - msantos
http://code.nasa.gov/project/balancing-load-across-systems-ballast/

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ngoldbaum
I guess this is how they manage SSH connection to Pleiades [1]. Cool! I use
Pleiades and am constantly impressed by the uptime and quality of service on
such a high-end resource.

[1]
[http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html](http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html)

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moe
What an odd idea.

Then again, they send stuff into space. Who am I to judge.

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cbhl
When you have enough users, and NFS homedirs, it makes sense.

The University of Waterloo just uses DNS round-robin, but that's not
particularly reliable since the load balancing is up to the whims of each
client's DNS client implementation.

And then there's software like mosh[0], which, IIRC, does round-robin on the
first connection but then sticks to the same server afterwards so that you can
e.g. connect to the same pty even if your local IP changed.

[0] [http://mosh.mit.edu/](http://mosh.mit.edu/)

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zokier
> The University of Waterloo just uses DNS round-robin

I take it that they do not allow running persistent applications? I personally
would not like to find my screen/tmux session "disappear" after reconnect
because I ended to another host.

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rat87
My University did something that seems similar. There was a group hostname
which I believe dropped you into one of a group of linux machines(with nfs
homedir) but you cold always specify the actual hostname of the computer where
you parked tmux.

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aalpbalkan
Sourceforge? Seriously? Why do NASA people and academia still upload things to
SF instead of GitHub?

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wildpeaks
I'm not sure why they still use Sourceforge, however they did move some of
their projects to Github: [https://github.com/nasa](https://github.com/nasa)

This one even has its own separated account:
[https://github.com/visionworkbench](https://github.com/visionworkbench)

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voltagex_
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/ballast/files/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/ballast/files/)
\- no sign of a VCS, I wonder what they use internally?

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nemothekid
The NASA page claims they use SVN

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voltagex_
At a guess, it isn't public -
[http://svn.code.sf.net/p/ballast/code](http://svn.code.sf.net/p/ballast/code)

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mindcrime
Looks like the source is in the distribution files. Download one of these:

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/ballast/files/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/ballast/files/)

and untar it and you'll find Perl and C source code.

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voltagex_
I guess that shows how spoilt I am by GitHub et-al.

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mbailey
Was actually looking at this a few days ago for a cluster of bastion nodes to
secured infrastructure. Ts a pretty interesting tool.

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saltylicorice
Horrible comma use in the description. You don't need either of 'em!

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twic
So instead of:

> Ballast is invoked as part of the SSH login process, hence has access to the
> user name, which is not available in traditional load balancers

You'd write:

> Ballast is invoked as part of the SSH login process hence has access to the
> user name which is not available in traditional load balancers

I'm afraid i can't agree. Both of those commas seem grammatically necessary to
me.

