NGINX load balancing - Proxy

[Francis Daly]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 08:38:07AM -0300, Carlos Renato wrote:

Hi there,

> Hello, I would like to use NGINX to balance traffic between two McAfee
> (standalone) proxy.

nginx as a server will listen for http or https requests; it does not "do"
http-proxy requests. (As in: it is not a http (forward) proxy server.)

nginx as a client will make http or https requests of another server;
it does not make http-proxy requests. (As in: it will not talk to a http
proxy server.)

There are some circumstances under which you can kind-of sort-of make
it work maybe well enough sometimes; but you would be fighting the
application and things will probably not be smooth.

So, for http-proxy traffic, you are probably better off using nginx's
"stream" feature instead of "http" feature, and just let nginx be a
tcp-pass-through.

http://nginx.org/r/stream and things like
http://nginx.org/en/docs/stream/ngx_stream_proxy_module.html and
http://nginx.org/en/docs/stream/ngx_stream_upstream_module.html --
it's conceptually similar to the http things that you already know,
except there is nothing http-specific about it.

> I've made some advances and I'm able to open an HTTP page.
> 
> Now, I need the client to open an HTTPS request.

If the client is configured to use a http proxy for a https request,
it will probably issue a CONNECT request to the proxy, expecting that
the proxy will open a connection to the external https server.

If nginx is a tcp-pass-through, all of that will be done on your upstream
McAfee servers, the way that you expect.

Good luck with it,

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org