Insights from the load balancer experts

Application Management

Load Balancing Exchange 2010 CAS Array with HAProxy (Quick Guide)

This Blog is for anyone wanting to load balance the Exchange 2010 CAS role using only open source software...

Aaron West

• 5 mins

High Availability

Simple bare metal restore of your load balancer with a USB stick

Does it seem like some appliance vendors go out of their way to make hardware recovery and licencing as difficult as possible?..

Mark Brookes

• 5 mins

Security

Secure Your Web Servers: SSL Termination and BEAST

The BEAST attack is a practical attack based on a protocol vulnerability and mainly affects the client side...

Scott McKeown

• 2 mins

WAF

For any poor sod who needs to deal with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

Any engineer dealing with PCI DSS compliance issues probably looses a little bit of the joy in life...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 4 mins

Print

Load balancing Microsoft Print Server

Microsoft Print Server provides a great way to share printers throughout your organisation, but when the print server falls over, the phone quickly starts to ring...

Rob Cooper

• 6 mins

How-tos

NTLM authenticating proxy check script

This script was designed primarily to be tied into Ldirectord but feel free to adapt it to your needs, and if you do make changes dont be a stranger post your adaptations below!..

Mark Brookes

• 5 mins

HAProxy

Load Balancer performance: Benchmarking HAProxy on EC2 (Quick and Dirty Style)

I get quite frustrated with benchmarks because they are very hard to perform properly, and even when you do them properly its very hard to get any useful data from them...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 2 mins

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...

Rob Cooper

• 4 mins

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...

Rob Cooper

• 4 mins

GSLB

Why does Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) suck?

OK, Before the flames start let me state the usual caveat, "GSLBs don't ALWAYS suck. Just most of the time"...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 4 mins

Performance

G-Zip Compression and Load Balancing

A couple of customers asked if our appliances would do G-Zip compression. In the past we hadn't given it much thought until someone offered us a card to test it!..

Mark Brookes

• 6 mins

Performance

EC2 load balancer appliance rocks, and its FREE... for now anyway.

I’m excited and slightly scared by our latest product! Excited because I've become slightly addicted to launching multiple instances in different parts of the world and load balancing the traffic seamlessly. Scared because this could change our whole business model...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 6 mins

How-tos

How to enable SNAT in LVS (xt_ipvs) and iptables

The vast majority of layer 4 load balancers use LVS in two-arm NAT mode...

Mark Brookes

• 3 mins

HAProxy

Load balancing Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) with HAProxy

Here at Loadbalancer.org we have recently started the certification process of our product with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS)...

Rob Cooper

• 2 mins

Open source

Load balancing Windows Terminal Server — HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker

When you have users depending on Windows Terminal Services for their main desktop, it's a good idea to have more than one Terminal Server. RDP, however, is not an easy protocol to load balance...

Andrew Zak

• 7 mins

HAProxy

Transparent proxy of SSL traffic using Pound to HAProxy backend patch and how-to

I've previously blogged about how to get TPROXY and HAProxy working nicely together, but what if you want to terminate SSL traffic on the load balancer to use HAProxy to insert cookies in the standard HTTP stream to the backend servers?..

Malcolm Turnbull

• 4 mins

High Availability

Loadbalancer.org guarantee 99.999% (5 nines) up-time to all of our customers.

Some vendors make a fair bit of hype about their products enabling 99.999% availability out of the box...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 4 mins

HAProxy

Configure HAProxy with TPROXY kernel for full transparent proxy

If you use HAProxy as the load balancer then all of the backend servers see the traffic coming from the IP address of the load balancer...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 6 mins

How-tos

LVS Local node patch for Linux 2.6.25, Centos 5 kernel build how-to

Standard Kernel builds of LVS (Linux Virtual Server) don't have the ability to load balance traffic that is from the local node...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 3 mins

Direct Server Return

Load balancing via Direct Routing has several key advantages over NAT based methods

One of the (many) traditional problems with load balancing is the requirement to change your infrastructure in order to implement a hardware load balancer...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 2 mins

Direct Server Return

Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return — How to solve the ARP problem on Windows Server 2022

Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return (DSR) aka. N-Path is a great load balancing method. And it is, without doubt, the fastest method possible...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 5 mins

Performance

Why Layer 7 load balancing sucks...

Hardware marketing execs get very excited about the fact that their product can magically scale your application by using ‘amazing Layer 7 technology’ in the load balancer such as cookie inserts and tracking/re-writing...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 6 mins