# LB targeting alias service
**URL:** https://forums.suse.com/t/lb-targeting-alias-service/803
**Category:** Rancher 1.x
**Created:** [October 28, 2015, 2:37pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/lb-targeting-alias-service/803 "2015-10-28T14:37:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kaos](https://forums.suse.com/u/kaos)
#### Post date: [October 28, 2015, 2:37pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/lb-targeting-alias-service/803/1 "2015-10-28T14:37:04Z")
Continuing the discussion from [Load Balancer config](http://forums.suse.com/t/load-balancer-config/181/12):
> [@Load Balancer config](https://forums.suse.com/t/load-balancer-config/181/12):
>
> So pointing a load balancer at a hostname is fairly unusual. It’s weird because it’s not clear when to resolve the name into a list of IPs… Every request would be terribly slow, observing the TTL of the DNS record is adding DNS code to the load balancer. So ha-proxy’s (and I believe nginx and most hardware balancers) behavior is to resolve the name on startup and never read it again (until restart).
>
> That behavior is rather undesirable if `external.com` ever changes. In particular, Amazon ELB regularly changes the target IPs of their balancers, so the name you get for many common SaaS services would regularly break.
>
> So the UI specifically hides external services that point to a hostname (vs IP addresses) from the dropdown because it’s not supported yet. Your step 2 is basically tricking the UI into allowing that because I don’t recursively follow alias chains when filtering them out 😄
>
> It appears the backend API doesn’t actually support this either (@alena) so it’s configuring based on an empty list of target IPs, and according to your output not even creating a `backend` entry at all.
>
> To say we support hostnames I think we’d have to make it work the way users expect, updating periodically according to the hostname’s TTL. I think we’ll need to add-on something that watches the names that are in the config, polls them periodically, and reloads ha-proxy whenever the list of IPs changes.
So, given the above, I would expect a service alias to work when used in a LB, but that doesn’t seem to work either.
But it doesn’t seem to work…
I have a made up example to show what I’ve reduced it to. Lookging at the HAproxy config, I would expect there to be two frontend sections, one for `alias` and one for `app`, but I only get one for `app`. So, the alias one doesn’t seem to work…
```auto
acl 0_host hdr(host) -i app:9999
use_backend 74d355d8-72cd-43c8-b7f6-7703aef3f2a4_0_backend if 0_host
```
With this stack:
```auto
testApp:
restart: always
tty: true
image: nginx
stdin_open: true
testAlias:
labels:
io.rancher.service.hash: 0df56b30668fd75508e1014b02924696ea6c0127
image: rancher/dns-service
links:
- testApp:testApp
testLB:
restart: always
ports:
- '9999'
labels:
io.rancher.service.hash: 04e47c9e88b6cb76e7402147d5622bda0381dd4e
io.rancher.loadbalancer.target.testApp: app=8080
io.rancher.loadbalancer.target.testAlias: alias=8080
tty: true
image: rancher/load-balancer-service
links:
- testAlias:testAlias
- testApp:testApp
stdin_open: true
```
```auto
testApp:
scale: 1
testAlias:
metadata:
io.rancher.service.hash: e84640c8cc8707f9f7c411aa2a576a387abbf560
testLB:
scale: 1
metadata:
io.rancher.service.hash: 27ed8e7c2afa77b797508795b80ace6b19de3c67
```
Reading the [docs](http://docs.rancher.com/rancher/rancher-ui/applications/stacks/adding-service-alias/) suggest that this should work.
---
### Author:  [@vincent](https://forums.suse.com/u/vincent)
#### Post date: [October 28, 2015, 7:16pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/lb-targeting-alias-service/803/2 "2015-10-28T19:16:13Z")
This sounds like [https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/2047](https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/2047) ; I think @alena is getting ready to do a round of balancer fixes.
---
### Author:  [@kaos](https://forums.suse.com/u/kaos)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2015, 7:23am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/lb-targeting-alias-service/803/3 "2015-10-29T07:23:15Z")
Thanks @vincent, that does indeed look like what I was experiencing. Plus 1’d. 😉