As with all things, the trick is to weigh the risk of disaster against the probability of benefit and do whatever makes sense within your own particular constraints.
is nobody using a host based solution to this? that is, are times when HA LB is needed for TCP (like video over http) also seen as times when a single UNIX host is too unreliable, even if it's fast enough, and an appliance is better? even last year's model of BSD or Linux 1U with a couple of broadcom GigE ports can run proxynetd at near wire speed. so performance isn't the issue unless we're talking 10GE, and there can't be many appliances operating at 10GE yet. or is the problem simply that there isn't a port or pkg or rpm of proxynet, and in spite of being 12 years old, nobody but me runs anything like it? (so, this boils down to, are folks only using proxies on outbound, still, in 2007?) ((and did you think squid was your only inbound proxying option?))