External contributions to HA-proxy

• FreeBSD port (Clément Laforet)
  Clément Laforet maintains an up to date port of haproxy for FreeBSD. If you want more information about this port, please consult Clément's work here :
  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/url.cgi?ports/net/haproxy/pkg-descr
  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/net/haproxy/
  http://www.freshports.org/net/haproxy
  
  
• patch to apply different weights to different servers (Sébastien Brize)
  This patch adds the 'weight' option to a server to provide smoother balancing between fast and slow servers. This patch is against 1.1.27 and available here because there may be other people looking for this feature.
  
  I did not include this change because it has a side effect that with fairly unequal weights, some servers might receive lots of consecutive requests. I already have some working code to provide a smooth and fair balancing in 1.2 and which will also work with hash-type load balancing.
  get it here : patch-haproxy-1.1.27-weight
  
  Usage: specify "weight X" on a server line.
  (Note: configurations written with this patch applied will normally still work with future 1.2 versions)
  
  
• patch to implement soft-stop (Alexander Lazic)
  This patch provides two features, one of which will soon be merged. It allows one to write a file enumerating servers which will have to be stopped, and then sending a signal to the running proxy to tell it to read the file and stop using these servers. The second part of the patch allows a backup server to share the same cookie as a primary server. This should have been done from the start, so it will be merged soon.
  
  The first part of the patch will not go this way into mainline, because it has indirect implications on security, since the running process will have to access a file on the file-system, while current version can run in a chrooted, empty, read-only directory. Since future versions will be hot-reconfigurable anyway, this feature will not be needed anymore.
  
  However, I understand that some people might need this feature. The patch provided here is against haproxy-1.1.28, but should also apply to more recent versions.
  get it here : haproxy_comafile+multi-cookie.diff
  Usage: Alex says that you just have to write the server names that you want to stop in the file, then kill -USR2 the running process. I have not tested it though.
  
  
• patch to support IPv6 on the client-side (Willy Tarreau)
  This feature was originally proposed as a patch against 1.1.27, and has now been included in 1.2. However, for people who don't want to install 1.2 in production, there still is the possibility to patch their production version.
  get it here : haproxy-1.1.27-ipv6.diff
  
  Usage: check haproxy 1.2 documentation.
  
  
• other yet undocumented patches Here you can find miscellaneous patches, most of which will make their way into the next release, thus why I don't want to loose my time documenting them.
  get them here : patches/