Insights from the load balancer experts

Application Management

Load Balancing Exchange 2013

Exchange 2013 is Microsoft's latest enterprise level messaging and collaboration server. It has been designed for simplicity of scale, hardware utilization, and failure isolation...

Rob Cooper

• 2 mins

Application Management

Load Balancing Exchange 2010

In Exchange 2010, system functionality is split into five server roles (Mailbox, Client Access (CAS), Unified Messaging, Hub Transport (HT) and Edge Transport).  Mandatory roles are Mailbox, Client Access and Hub Transport...

Rob Cooper

• 2 mins

Security

Why did my Loadbalancer just fail the PCI compliance test?

Let me first say that I'm not really a fan of PCI scanners. It's not so much that I'm anti security scanners but rather that scanning for vulnerabilities based on only the version number a package returns seems rather simplistic to me...

Aaron West

• 1 min

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...

Mark Brookes

• 4 mins

HAProxy

3 ways to send HAProxy health check email alerts: Configuration how-to

The ideal way to monitor the health of the real servers is to to have a dedicated monitoring system in place such as Nagios. However this isn’t always an option, so for some they require the loadbalancer to send an alert...

Ben Cabot

• 4 mins

HAProxy

HAProxy load balancer feedback agent — We've Open Sourced both our Windows and Linux versions for you!

In general when you are load balancing a cluster you can evenly spread the connections through the cluster. However, with some applications, you might get very high load from just a few users doing heavy work, which can compromise performance...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 10 mins

Performance

What do you mean my pipe is saturated?

Some of the most common questions we get at Loadbalancer.org are performance related. It is quite difficult to give a straight answer to these questions as the real answer is often slightly unsatisfactory...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 2 mins

Performance

Look, why can't you just tell me how many people are connected to the load balancer?

I must confess, at certain times it has looked like open warfare would break out between the support team and development team at Loadbalancer.org over the last few months...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 6 mins

Microsoft

Microsoft drops support for mstshash RDP cookies? (embrace and destroy policy?)

We are pretty sure Microsoft have quietly fixed this bug and not told anyone... But the story is quite fun so lets leave it here for a lesson in corporate stupidity..

Dave Saunders

• 5 mins

High Availability

Exchange 2013 - Microsoft finally have an email solution designed for high availability and load balancing

In Exchange Server 2013, there are two basic building blocks – the Client Access Array and the Database Availability Group (DAG)...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 3 mins

HAProxy

HAProxy email alerts guide

As of haproxy-1.6-dev1 it is now possible to send email alerts directly from HAProxy thanks to the excellent work done for us by Simon Horman...

Aaron West

• 2 mins

HAProxy

Setting up HAProxy with Transparent Mode on Centos 6.x

Transparent mode with HAProxy allows you to see the IP Address of the clients computer while still having a high availability service using HAProxy...

Scott McKeown

• 4 mins

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

Security

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

• 5 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