OK, so let me begin by saying that I am both excited and slightly scared by our latest product. I’m excited because after playing around with it in the Amazon cloud, I’ve become slightly addicted to launching multiple instances in different parts of the world and load balancing the traffic seemlessly. I’m slightly scared because this could change our whole business model from hardware load balancer vendor to online SAAS (Software As A Service) provider.

So why does the new Loadbalancer.org EC2 VA rock?

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Just a brief guide on how to enable SNAT in LVS with iptables.

Firstly this is all very bleeding edge and as yet has not made it into the current kernel it should be in 2.6.36 with a new version of iptables released not long after that. But for those of you far to eager to use this already here is what you do. N.B I will also go through the process of enabling it so if your reading this and 2.6.36 is available as is the latest version of iptables you can probably skip the start of this article.
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OK, So we said we would never do a trade show again…..
But how can you give up on the humble trade show before going to the biggest one of all?

Vegas Baby!

We made a group decision after a couple of beers at the local dog racing track (but thats another story) to put a trade show stand at Interop 2010 Vegas.
For a small investment of about $10K for a stand and $5K for hotel, flights and gambling expenses (are they tax deductible?). Of course we paid in advance and it didn’t occur to us that the whole of European airspace would be shut down to flights because of a little volcano in Iceland called Eyjafjallajoekull !

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Here at Loadbalancer.org we have recently started the certification process of our product with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). We already have several customers doing this with our units in Direct Routing mode but with the new Loadbalancer.org - ENTERPRISE v6.8 you can do it with the Microsoft recommended SNAT mode. So how can you do this yourself for free with the open source load balancer HAProxy? Read on……
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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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