Health Check Methods
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
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Q:
BQ wrote: Has anyone identified a way for Layer 4 switches to do an effective service check of an iChain proxy server? The best way I currently know of for an L4 switch to monitor the health of the iChain server is to do a port check for 80/443 on each of the accelerator IPs.
A:
BQ, most L4 switches allow you to do an L7 health check, e.g., send a GET or HEAD HTTP method to a remote Web server being fronted. In the case of iChain, you could create a public protected resource and point the L7 health monitor to that URL. This would show that the HTTP service is up, and capable of servicing requests. You can also run a health check on the SSL port to where the L4 switch sends a client_hello request with the sessionID field set to 0.
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