                            lbcd version 3.3.0
                      (responder for load balancing)
              Maintained by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

  Copyright 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
  Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University.  This software is
  distributed under an MIT-style license.  Please see the section LICENSE
  below for terms of use and redistribution.

DESCRIPTION

  The lbcd daemon runs on a Unix system and answers UDP queries (by
  default on port 4330) with information about system load, number of
  logged on users, uptime, and free /tmp space.  The intention is for this
  information to be used by a load balancer service to choose the best
  system to direct incoming connections to.  It was designed for use with
  the lbnamed DNS load balancer, available at:

      <http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/>

  It was originally written by Roland Schemers, was rewritten by Larry
  Schwimmer to add protocol version 3 with some additional features and
  service probing, and is currently maintained by Russ Allbery.

  The information provided isn't particularly sophisticated, and a good
  hardware load balancer will be able to consider such things as
  connection latency and responsiveness to make better decisions, but lbcd
  with lbnamed works quite well for smaller scale problems, scales well to
  multiple load balance pools for different services, and is much simpler
  and cheaper to understand and deploy.

  Included in this package is a small client program, lbcdclient, which
  can query an lbcd server and display a formatted version of the returned
  information.

INSTALLATION

  Compilation and installation are very simple.  Just run:

      ./configure
      make

  and then as root, run:

      make install

  This will install lbcd in /usr/local/sbin, lbcdclient in /usr/local/bin,
  and the man pages in /usr/local/man.  To specify a different location
  for installation, pass the --prefix option to configure.  For more
  information, run:

      ./configure --help

  lbcdclient is written in Perl, so you may have to edit the first line of
  the script to point to the correct Perl location on your system.  It
  does not use any sophisticated Perl features or add-on modules.

  You will generally want to start lbcd at system boot.  There is an init
  script in debian/init for Debian systems; for other systems, all that is
  needed is a simple init script to start lbcd with the appropriate
  options or kill it again.  It writes its PID into /var/run/lbcd.pid by
  default (and this can be changed with the -P option).  On many systems,
  lbcd will need to run as root or as a member of particular groups to
  obtain system load average and uptime information.

LICENSE

  Copyright 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
  Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University.

  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
  copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
  "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
  the following conditions:

  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
  in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
  OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
