Insights from the load balancer experts

Direct Server Return

Yahoo’s L3 Direct Server Return (DSR), an alternative to LVS-TUN, explored.

L3 DSR is an alternative technique to achieve direct server return at Layer 3. Instead of using an IPIP tunnel like LVS-TUN it changes the destination IP address like LVS-NAT when sending the traffic to the real server...

Aaron West

• 6 mins

Comparisons

JetNEXUS (EdgeNEXUS) review and Kemp comparison

You can check directly what customers having been telling Gartner about Loadbalancer.org, JetNexus, Barracuda Networks and Kemp Technologies on the new Peer Insights platform...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 8 mins

Direct Server Return

Layer 4 Direct Routing (LVS-DR) and Layer 4 TUN (LVS-TUN) in AWS

LVS-DR and LVS-TUN are both forms of Direct Server Return where the load balancer only has to deal with one half of the connection...

Aaron West

• 6 mins

Automation

How to automate legacy load balancer deployments

Automation is very important for many organisations, which is why it's one of the core features of our upcoming V9 release...

Andrew Smalley

• 8 mins

Events

Macmillan coffee morning - cake or death?!

We recently held a coffee morning at Loadbalancer.org HQ to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support. To support the charity we were selling coffee and cake throughout the day - and we even had a bake off! I must admit...competition was tough!..

Annu Sroa

• 1 min

HAProxy

Breaking HAProxy with the help of a Spirent Avalanche and lots of very small packets...

HAProxy is awesome. So awesome in fact, that here at Loadbalancer.org HQ - I find it very difficult to generate enough load to break it...so let's try harder!..

Mark Brookes

• 6 mins

Security

Security through obscurity - double login protection made easy...

Security through obscurity is not a great idea when it is your ONLY protection technique. For example moving your SSH port from 22 -> 23 won't fool any hackers for long! However, I've always liked putting a 'double login' in front of important web sites to frustrate simple automated hacking tools...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 3 mins

Application Management

How to load balance Microsoft FTP Server with HAProxy

Open standards are awesome, and the File Transfer Protocol FTP (inspite of its flaws) has been in constant use for an amazing 40 years! FTP can be a pain to run over firewalls and load balancers, so this blog explains how to configure Microsoft FTP and HAProxy...

Andrei Grigoras

• 6 mins

Healthcare

Load balancing diagnostic medical imaging — Strengthening the radiology workflow

An efficient, resilient radiology workflow is crucial to delivering the best patient care. A complex and ever-changing environment, often with resource constraints, requires a considered approach...

James Loveday

• 5 mins

How-tos

Client Certificate Authentication with HAProxy: How to configure

Using client certificates for security is a pretty cool idea! You can protect an entire application or even just a specific Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to only those that provide a valid client certificate...

Aaron West

• 9 mins

AWS / Azure / GCP

Loadbalancer.org achieves Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner Status

We're proud to announce that we have achieved Advanced Technology Partner status with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading platform for public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service...

Annu Sroa

• 1 min

Healthcare

How to configure a DICOM ECHO health check for medical imaging systems

We thought it was important to have a specific health check built into our appliance for the commonly used DICOM protocol (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine)...

Andrew Smalley

• 5 mins

WAF

Load Balancing Nginx Web Servers with OWASP Top 10 WAF in Azure

SSL offload is handled by STunnel, while HAProxy handles back-end server re-encryption...

Imannuel Graham

• 5 mins

Events

Visit us on stand E9 at IP EXPO Europe (and WIN!)

Pop by stand E9 for a coffee (or beer!) and a chat with one of our experts or if you would like to arrange a specific time to meet just ping us an email...

Annu Sroa

• 2 mins

Security

How to stop web form spam — use a simple honey pot trap in ModSecurity...

How frustrating do you find it when hackers or robots fill in your website forms with "Buy Viagra Now!" type spam?..

Aaron West

• 4 mins

Comparisons

Kemp Technologies vs F5 — a refreshingly honest load balancer comparison

If you are trying to decide which load balancer product is right for your business, you’ve probably already discovered that it’s a market of two extremes...

Richard Halcrow

• 4 mins

Security

Stack Clash and Loadbalancer.org

The long and short of it is, there are updates to the Linux kernel and glibc packages which will 'fix' the issue..

Dave Saunders

• 2 mins

How-tos

Transparent vs Explicit proxy — which method should I use?

Different vendors have widely different opinions on which method should be used to deploy web filters or SWGs. Historically, vendors struggled to implement authentication in Transparent mode, and maybe they remember some awkward conversations with customers that chose the wrong method...

Neil Hosking

• 5 mins

Comparisons

Lost sale lessons

We have been fortunate to serve some of the biggest names in their respective industries because they recognised our best assets...

James Loveday

• 4 mins

Comparisons

15 reasons why you don't need a load balancer: Yes, really

If you want to test your site against this kind of attack, slow attacks like this are quite inexpensive for attackers to launch, and they don't need control of many remote hosts in order to launch an effective attack...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 5 mins

Education

Leading European research university maintains top-class website with Loadbalancer.org

“Now if one of our servers was to go down, we wouldn’t worry too much because we know that with Loadbalancer.org’s Enterprise MAX Clustered Pair in place it’s not really going to be much of a problem,” says Braam...

Jake Borman

• 4 mins

What exactly is a reverse proxy? Reverse proxy v forward proxy

Technically, the only mode on a load balancer that is a real Reverse Proxy is Layer 7 mode. Whereas all Layer 4 load balancing modes such as NAT, DR and TUN are nothing like a reverse proxy. The clients are effectively talking directly (transparently) to the backend servers...

Aaron West

• 3 mins

Comparisons

Great products don't need to be sold

Simply reeling off a list of product benefits doesn’t cut it...

James Loveday

• 3 mins

Performance

Voice Activated Load Balancing? Could it actually work

We decided that we would like to be able to change server states and bring them online, offline or drain them. So asking Alexa to do this would look like “Alexa ask Val to change status of website1 to drain”. So we started work with this as our goal...

Ben Cabot

• 3 mins