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; sessions are long-lived and need to be persistent to a particular server, and users may connect from different source addresses during one session.

The current development version of HAProxy has made an important step forward in making this possible. Thanks to work by Exceliance, it now supports RDP Cookies, offering a solution to the persistence problem.

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Having just survived yet another boring trade show (IPExpo 2009) we have made a morale boosting decision to never do one again! (Well we might do Vegas for a laugh but thats a different story). I’m sure the other vendors out there dread the trade shows as well; and in the past they have almost been a compulsory part of being an IT vendor. However if you look at the costs of getting a stand and hotel and travel and lots of entrainment expenses it really doesn’t stack up. We spent £20,000+ last year on trade shows with little to show for it but hang overs and sore feet. £20,000 is an awful lot of Google Ads! almost 3 times our current adwords budget….. Anyway just to annoy the staff a description of Loadbalancer.org’s show follows: Read the rest of this entry »

This load balancing post is a little bit cheeky.. as its a bit of an experiment with catching Google’s eye on the net, the Loadbalancer.org site does pretty well for the search term “Load Balancer”… but sucks big time for the second most popular term “Load Balancing”… Now I noticed that Loadbalancing.net gets a first search page result with no virtually zero relevant content so the domain name must help a lot! Read the rest of this entry »

Like my previous blog entry I will endeavour  explain how to recover from master failure but this time with version 5.10. (NOTE: once again this will only work with a simple configuration anything more complicated than simple direct routing its best to contact support@loadbalancer.org)

Hopefully you have your backup files – getharesources.php, getloadbalancercf.php and getrealip.php.

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As a new member of the Loadbalancer team, I have been given the unenviable task of explaining how to recover your cluster should your master fail, (Note: fail as in hardware failure not just unplugging the network cable!)

Hopefully you have handy the backup configuration file – lb_config.xml

If you don’t have a copy already and your looking at this article because your organised and planning for disaster, NOW might be a good time to go and get one.

Log into your master Loadbalancer and select “Maintenance” and click on “Disaster Recovery” then “Download XML Configuration file” and keep the file that is downloaded somewhere safe. Read the rest of this entry »

OK so 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 in order to use HaProxy to insert cookies in the standard HTTP stream to the backend servers?

Many thanks to Krisztián Ivancsó  for working on the TPROXY patch for Pound for us, we can finally do this!

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Over the last few months we’d experienced two fairly lengthly outages on our web server. It was a dedicated server with a UK host and we’re not exactly sure of the reason for the downtime - could have been network failure, could have been the server crashing. It had become pretty annoying for us, and we realised that for a company touting the use of load balancers for High Availability, it is important that our own website should be up! Also, as Loadbalancer.org recieves traffic from every corner of the globe, we wanted to see what we could do to reduce latency to the farther-flung continents. Read the rest of this entry »

The following instructions detail how to recover any Loadbalancer.org appliance to v6.6 via any USB stick 1 Gb or greater.

NB. This will only work on 64Bit hardware. All version 6 appliances are 64Bit. If you are running an older version this may still be possible depending on the hardware you are running on. Read the rest of this entry »