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…)

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. (more…)