Automatic Failover and Maintenance Pages with iptables

Using iptables for automatic failover or maintenance pages might seem like a strange choice, but it works!

iptables has an obscure but useful feature, the socket filter. From the man page:

socket

This matches if an open socket can be found by doing a socket lookup on the packet.

In other words, we can use this filter to redirect incoming connections to a “failover” server when the main server.
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