Equilibria is a simple IP load-balancing forwarding/proxy socket server. The user creates one or more listener/target-set pairs; Equilibria listens for traffic at the specified listener and forwards the traffic to one of the specified targets (selected at random) in the target set. Any traffic received back from the target is forwarded to the client machine over the original socket. This back-and-forth forwarding of traffic continues until the client closes the connection or the target fails (at which point another target is chosen at random for the client).

Equilibria is under active development (after being resurrected after a many-year hiatus) and needs some work to flesh it out to be usable for what I now need it to do; additional documentation will be added once this first round of improvements are in place.

Syntax:

# equilibria listener_port:target_address:target_port,target_address:target_port,...

This will open a TCP socket listening on listener_port, and each incoming connection will choose one of the subsequent target_address:target_port combinations to forward to.

• Add new capabilities to the control socket for doing runtime manipulation of listeners and targets.
• Unify the control socket handling in multi-fork mode so the user only needs to interact with the primary daemon instead of having each daemon have its own independent control socket.
• Packet socket support (i.e., AF_PACKET) to enable raw socket proxying.
• Add loadable module support for pluggable target selection rather than hard-coding the current choose-at-random algorithm.
• Add support for Docker integration so that target identities can be automatically ascertained via Docker REST queries instead of hard-coded addresses or DNS lookups. Should also be dynamically updated.
• Add support for SSL sockets for secure tunneling of otherwise insecure/vulnerable protocols. Potential alternative to stunnel, SSH tunneling, etc.