Integration
Logging, monitoring, analytics, and other cool integrations.
How-tos
A comprehensive guide to log monitoring with ModSecurity and HAProxy
With numerous options available, choosing and configuring the right tool can be daunting...
Open source
What is Stunnel and how do you configure it?
Here is another example of a more “exotic” Stunnel configuration. Most people, and rightly so, will ask “but why?”. Well, because we can!..
How-tos
How to create an SSL certificate in Linux
I thought I would try and cover the basics here by explaining how to create an SSL certificate and the various files that you'll end up with...
Automation
Automating load balancer management with Ansible Playbooks
Ansible is an open source project sponsored by RedHat, and is the simplest way to automate IT tasks...
Automation
Using Grafana with your Loadbalancer.org appliance
How many times have you looked at the HAProxy report and thought, what on earth is this all about?! What are the busiest times on my Loadbalancer? Which Real Server is busy? How much traffic is going through my VIPs?..
How-tos
Using Prometheus with your Loadbalancer.org appliance
With our recent release, you can now use the new Prometheus exporter to export the HAProxy metrics into an existing Prometheus environment...
Automation
Solving the Layer 4 ARP problem on Linux with Ansible
The "ARP problem" for Layer 4 DR (Direct Routing) mode is something that needs to be solved for each of your Real Servers in the virtual service...
Automation
Automation of the initial setup of your Loadbalancer.org appliance (VMware Edition)
Although our appliances are absolutely awesome and fun to use, going through the same process many times may become slightly tedious!..
WAF
Extending ModSecurity: How to add completely custom WAF functionality
In this example, I’m going to add a new transformation function to ModSecurity to calculate the Scrabble score of a variable. This will allow us to block HTTP requests containing query string parameters with a Scrabble score above a chosen threshold...
Integration
How to create a load balancer SSL/TLS certificates report
I should really say that not every request of this type can be turned around on the same day - but we do try!..
Open source
NGINX and X-Forwarded-For Header (XFF)
The X-Forwarded-For Header is a simple yet powerful solution to a very common problem. I'm not sure why, but for some reason it also seems to cause a lot of confusion...
AWS / Azure / GCP
How to add Cloudflare in front of HAProxy
Cloudflare provides a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that delivers web content to clients based on the geographic location of the client...
Microsoft
How to enhance Microsoft IIS health checks using VBscript
By default, the load balancer uses a TCP connect to the port defined in the Virtual Service to verify the health of each real (backend) server. For IIS, this would typically be port 80...
Open source
Stunnel X-Forward-For (XFF) with HAProxy and the PROXY Protocol
By default, the source IP address of the packet reaching the web servers is the IP address of the load balancer and not the IP address of the client...
Open source
SSL offload testing with HAProxy and Stunnel
There are a lot of SSL offload throughput statistics available for appliances across the internet but rarely do they detail the way they were tested...
Application Management
Apache and X-Forwarded-For Header: How to log XFF using Apache
There’s been a lot of debate here in the office about how best to capture both your Loadbalancer’s IP and the Source IP of the user in your access_log in Apache 2.4. This is the tried and tested method we've come up with...
How-tos
IIS and X-Forwarded-For Header (XFF)
Although it's not technically a standard, the X-Forwarded-For (XFF) header is incredibly useful if you have any kind of proxy in front of your web servers...