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I just setup a load balancer for my lan using pfSense. Its kind of a strange setup, because the LAN and WAN ports are on the same network, but it works. I have the LAN set to bridge with the WAN, and the WAN has a private ip in my lan, with its gateway set to the same as the rest of the hosts on the lan.

Why did I do this? Well I am often reconfiguring things on my lan, such as my squid proxy-cache and my dns server, and even my database services. By using a virtual server ip address, I can reorganize things so much more easily. Thanks pfSense!

Further setup details:

• Virtual server ip is the wan ip
• Clients should connect to that ip (I use a nameserver to provide one more level of abstraction)
• Under Setup -> Advanced, I checked "suppress arp messages", as well as "sticky connections". Sticky connections keep a connection through the load balancer on the same ip in the pool.

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