This is to announce the release of Pound v0.2. Changes from previous version: - added HTTP/HTTPS request checking. Pound will only accept well-formed requests, thus protecting the back-end server(s) from malicious clients. I believe that this is now good enough to allow a ZServer to run without an Apache/Squid front-end (though you may still want Squid as a cache manager). - added request logging (can still be turned off with a flag). This means that now there is a central log with the correct client addresses. - fixed a few minor bugs. Many thanks to all the people who responded with suggestions and remarks. A few people asked why not simply use Squid rather than Pound. The answer is mostly a question of taste and philosophy: I believe a load-balancer should do no caching. The load-balancer, by its very nature, may become a bottle-neck for the whole system, and thus should be as light-weight as possible. If your application could really benefit from a front-end cache (which is not always the case) then put the caching proxy on the back-end server - e.g. between Pound and Zope - but allow Pound to run alone on a biggish machine. What is Pound (from the Web page) - a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers. - a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information. - an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end browsers. - an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones. For further information, download, etc. please see http://www.apsis.ch/pound The software is at version 0.2. Further testing (especially under heavy loads), improvements and bug (what bugs ?) fixes are welcome. Pound is distributed under the GPL. Enjoy and let me know how it works for you. -- Robert Segall Apsis GmbH Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707 Tel: +41-1-920 4904