July 10th, 2009 by James Little
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 »
Posted in AWS, High Availability, Load Balancing, cloud | No Comments »
May 13th, 2009 by Jake Borman
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 »
Posted in Disaster recovery, Load Balancing, Version Control | 3 Comments »
May 13th, 2009 by Malcolm Turnbull
VMware tools are based on proprietary modules for the Linux Kernel and therefore need compiling from source to install.
NB. Unless you have a specific reason to upgrade the supplied tools don’t worry about it. Our appliances make heavy use of the 64Bit e1000 network driver which is part of the default kernel, the appliance doesn’t strictly need any of the extra VMware tool functionality.
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Posted in Linux, Load Balancing, VMmware | No Comments »
March 16th, 2009 by Thorsten Wetzig
For our software development we use Subversion - a powerful free tool for version control of files. Any file types are supported, even binary files. To be able to work with Subversion you have to setup a Subversion server. Then you can access the server from Subversion clients.
This blog entry shows one way to setup Subversion server on a Linux machine.
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Posted in Linux, Subversion, Version Control | 1 Comment »
March 12th, 2009 by Malcolm Turnbull
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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Posted in High Availability, Load Balancing | No Comments »
February 11th, 2009 by Malcolm Turnbull
Standard Kernel builds don’t support TPROXY ( 2.6.28 does now!).
For example if you use HaProxy as the load balancer then all of the backend servers see the traffic coming from the IP address of the load balancer. TPROXY allows you to make sure the backend servers see the true client IP address in the logs.
Ps. An easier alternative is inserting the clients ip in the x-forwarded-for header (option forwardfor).
For TPROXY to work you need three things:
1) TPROXY compiled into the linux kernel
2) TPROXY / Socket compiled into netfilter / iptables (due in v1.4.3?)
3) HaProxy compiled with the USE_LINUX_TPROXY option
The TPROXY patch for Linux Kernel 2.6.25.11 is here:
http://www.balabit.com/downloads/files/tproxy/tproxy-kernel-2.6.25-20080519-165031-1211208631.tar.bz2
The following is a guide how to install on Centos 5.1:
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Posted in Linux, Load Balancing, haproxy | 25 Comments »
October 10th, 2008 by Jake Borman
I know the world is falling apart with the credit crunch and all that, but please don’t call the load balancer vendor when your internet bank falls over. We’ve had a couple of messages similar to the following:
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Posted in Load Balancing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
September 16th, 2008 by Stephen Wilde
Recently I was asked by a customer for an R16 evaluation unit. After dispatching the unit it appeared the R16 would be in good company, namely; Citrix, F5, Jetnexus and CIA. The customer was evaluating a unit from all the above manufactures. Win or lose I felt this would be an interesting independent test of the R16 against some well know names………
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Posted in Load Balancing | 2 Comments »
September 15th, 2008 by Jake Borman
| Loadbalancer.org are one of a number of vendors that pride themselves on offering affordable load balancing appliances that work. It is the likes of such companies that have collectively driven down the price of these solutions, making load balancing appliances available to companies who previously would not have been in a position to consider such investments.Kemp Technologies are a similar company who’s primary marketing drive centre’s around ‘value for money’. It is because of this glaring similarity that I decided to compare SSL performance capabilities, focusing on the entry-level appliance on offer from each vendor. Specification comparisons were taken, and subsequent performance tests examined whether performance levels met that of the stated specification. Results proved extremely interesting! |
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Posted in Load Balancing, SSL | No Comments »
September 12th, 2008 by James Little
A few months ago on my personal blog I wrote about the difficulty of installing CentOS on the Dell R200, owing to the SATA DVD drive used in the unit. The R200 is our unit of choice for our ClusterScale “Pegasys” product, so installing Linux distros on this server is a regular occurrence for us. Fortunately, we got hold of a Redhat driver image from Dell and we managed to load it on using a USB key. This is a simple case of typing linux dd at the installation command prompt, but note that you must copy the .img file onto the USB disk, rather than the files within the image itself.
Originally the problem was with CentOS 5.0, but as far as I know it’s still a problem with versions 5.1 and 5.2. Ubuntu installations do not seem to pose the same problem, so presumably they bundle SATA DVD drivers with the distro. I still can’t find this particular driver on the Dell site, so seems like a good idea to host it here too.
Tags: CentOS 5, Dell R200, linux installation
Posted in Linux | No Comments »
