[Zope] ANNOUNCE: Pound - reverse proxy and load balancer - v0.9

[Robert Segall]

This is to announce the release of Pound v0.9.

New in this release:

- Added support for listening on multiple ports/addresses (please see the man 
page for new configuration directives)
- Added support for lock/unlock (required for WebDAV). There is a new 
configuration option for allowing these requests to pass through.
- Support for "old-style" HTTP responses, where the content is simply between 
the headers and EOF. This was necessary for people who access Pound through 
Squid.
- Fixed a serious problem on FreeBSD: the pthreads implementation defined too 
small a stack size.
- Fixed a small problem in URL parsing.

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.
- an HTTP/1.1 to 1.0 proxy.
- a fail-over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note of 
the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers.
- a request redirector - it will pass client requests to separate groups of 
servers, based on required URL (pattern matching)

Pound was specifically developed to serve as a front-end for multiple 
instances of Zope running on top of a common ZEO storage, but can be used 
with any other web server. A patch for the Python source of z2.py is 
available as part of the distribution to allow using Pound's SSL capabilities.

For further information, download, etc. please see http://www.apsis.ch/pound

The software is at version 0.9 (beta quality). Further testing (especially 
under heavy loads), improvements and suggestions are welcome.

Pound is distributed under the GPL.

Enjoy and let me know how it works for you.

P.S. - from following the discussions on this list and some questions we 
received it seems like some people consider the VHM as something to be used 
only in conjunction with the Apache mod_proxy. That is simply not true - the 
VHM works perfectly well on its own: just click on the mappings tab and set 
whatever mappings you require. VHM will translate requests and responses 
happily back and forth, including the nasty base tag and absolute URLs (such 
as in images).
-- 
Robert Segall
Apsis GmbH
Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707
Tel: +41-1-920 4904