Re: [SAGE] Limiting outbound connections with a reverse proxy?

[Marco Marongiu <brontolinux@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Brad & *

Brad Knowles wrote:
> You don't tell us what kind of service you're talking about, but from
> your mention of Pound, I'm assuming that this is a web problem?

Right, sorry.

We are talking of a web service (SOAP) sitting on a Solaris host, and a
consumer running on Linux.

Therefore, iptables could be an option on the source machine, but on the
target it wouldn´t. Nor ipfw would be on both.

> Certainly, setting up a proxy of some sort that can take advantage of
> connection caching, etc... would seem to be a way to improve your
> performance, and depending on the nature of the application, I would
> think that even squid, apache, or other web servers could be set up in
> this kind of role.

Actually it´s not performance what we are looking for at the moment:
it´s to feed the web service with nothing more that it can handle, that
is: 10 connections per second at maximum.

Therefore, the proxy (or whatever it will be) needs to accept N
connections per second, and dispatch them at a maximum rate of 10
conn/sec, enqueing the exceeding ones until they can be dispatched,
possibly using a FIFO policy.

> And squid apparently does have a way to limit the number of simultaneous
> connections from a client, see
> <http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-limit-squid-proxy-number-web-connections.html>.

That´s not the case unfortunately. What we want to limit are the
outbound connections from the proxy to the service, and enqueue the
exceeding ones. Returning a `connection refused´ error would disrupt the
service.

> But with just five minutes of Googling, I'm not finding anything else
> that would appear to be obviously related to what it seems like you're
> talking about.

Is it clearer now?

Thanks a lot to everybody
--Marco

-- 
                             Marco Marongiu
     System Administrator - Technical Writer - Perl Programmer