The idea of a Python-based load balancer, txLoadBalancer, piqued my interest. It took a bit of futzing around to actually get it running, because the distribution doesn’t specify its dependencies or include a sample config file.

$ mkvirtualenv --no-site-packages txLoadBalancer-test
$ bin/pip install txLoadBalancer twisted pycrypto pyasn1 pyopenssl
$ mkdir etc
$ curl -L http://bit.ly/iYWhWp > etc/config.xml
$ bin/twistd -noy ./bin/txlb.tac 

Aside from the web interface, you can connect to the program with ssh:

$ ssh -p 7002 admin@localhost

This gives you a Python though I don’t yet know how to do anything useful with it 🙂