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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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! (more…)

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. (more…)

Yeah right :-). Maybe after we sort out problems in our own back yard….

Our web server crashed again the other day (It last happened about 2 years ago). I was on holiday at the time and got an automated message saying “www.loadbalancer.org is toast!”.  I thought OK thats annoying but not the end of the world, but it was a Sunday afternoon and about an hour later I got a message from one of our support guys saying that they could not get through to the 24*7 support engineers to look into the server failure. Thats when I remembered that last time this happened I thought about setting up a mirror dedicated server to save downtime in the event of a re-build being required… oops didn’t do  that did I?

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