External health checking - OPTIONS returns 405

[merlin corey]

Hello,

You can change HAProxy's health check request method to HEAD.  This
would be the easiest/best solution and still highly lightweight, in my
opinion.

If for some reason you cannot do that, I created an extremely simple
module for nginx which just always replies with a "normal" OPTIONS
reply.  You can download this module from
http://www.rumandcoke.org/nginx/noptions.tar.gz ; extract it (I put it
in src/http/modules) and append --add-module=src/http/modules/noptions
(or your path to the module) then rebuild NginX.  This has not been
tested or used since 0.6.3? and may require some small changes for
0.7/0.8 (but it might not).

Thanks,
Merlin

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Pedro Mata-Mouros
Fonseca<pedro.matamouros at sapo.pt> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> The following is an HAProxy option httpchk check request. It's purpose is to
> check a server's health by means of issuing a very lightweight request to
> it. It does this, by default, using OPTIONS (it's possible to configure it
> to perform any type of request, but OPTIONS is aparently the most
> lightweight).
>
> Nginx unfortunately returns a 405 to this. It's not really a big deal, but
> is there anyway to "force" Nginx to return a 200 with an empty payload or as
> small as possible? Would you still consider this a lightweight check to
> perform every 2 or so seconds, on a few hundred reqs/sec website?
>
> 127.0.0.1 - - [03/Jul/2009:17:34:21 +0100] "OPTIONS / HTTP/1.0" 405 166 "-"
> "-"
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> Pedro.
>
>