The Pound program is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL – no warranty, it’s free to use, copy and give away.
WHAT POUND IS:
1. a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers.
2. a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information.
3. an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end servers.
4. an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones.
5. 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.
6. a request redirector: requests may be distributed among servers according to the requested URL.
Pound is a very small program, easily audited for security problems. It can run as setuid/setgid and/or in a chroot jail. Pound does not access the hard-disk at all (except for reading the certificate file on start, if required) and should thus pose no security threat to any machine.
WHAT POUND IS NOT:
1. Pound is not a Web server: by itself, Pound serves no content – it contacts the back-end server(s) for that purpose.
2. Pound is not a Web accelerator: no caching is done – every request is passed “as is” to a back-end server.
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