A new network load balancing/firewall node for use in a system including
multiple network load balancing/firewall nodes is disclosed. The network
load balancing/firewall applies bi-directional load balancing affinity
with regard to requests from external clients and corresponding responses
from internal network servers. An external network load balancing adapter
executes a load-balancing algorithm to determine whether a received
client request is accepted by the network load balancing/firewall node. A
firewall utility processes the received client request and maintains
state information associated with the received client request. An
internal network load balancing adapter executes a complementary
load-balancing algorithm simultaneously on each network load
balancing/firewall node to ensure that the same network load
balancing/firewall node accepts a response from an internal network
server corresponding to the received client request.