The latest insights from the load balancing experts | Loadbalancer.org

Malcolm Turnbull

Malcolm is the founder of Loadbalancer.org, a company that has generated more than 15 years strong organic growth using Open Source technology sold as packaged hardware & software solutions. He has a tendency to talk way too much and play devils advocate in any conversation.
News
Huawei root access is BAD! VERY, VERY BAD: Or, how we reasoned ourselves out of root access by default Malcolm Turnbull
As you probably know, the notorious Chinese tech company was blacklisted by Google on the instructions of the Trump administration. All this high-profile paranoia about security got me thinking about our approach to the subject as we prepare to release v8.3.7 of the load balancer appliance...

4 min read

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Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Darktrace: When looks aren't everything Malcolm Turnbull
These are scary times when it comes to cybersecurity. Following on from high-profile breaches at Equifax, British Airways, Ticketmaster, Newegg and more, it’s not surprising that companies are prepared to pay top dollar for

4 min read

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What exactly is a 'Modern DevOps' load balancer? Malcolm Turnbull
If you Google 'modern load balancer', you will quickly find the awesome blog from Matt Klein — followed by some marketing fluff from AVI Networks and NGINX+. It's really annoying when people believe — that something traditional

4 min read

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HAProxy
What exactly is a 'Modern DevOps' load balancer? Malcolm Turnbull
If you Google 'modern load balancer', you will quickly find the awesome blog from Matt Klein — followed by some marketing fluff from AVI Networks and NGINX+. It's really annoying when people believe — that something traditional

4 min read

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Top 10 Blogs
Top 10 Blogs
The 15 year story behind Loadbalancer.org.... Malcolm Turnbull
I was part of the generation that grew up without computers. We played Cowboys and Indians and dreamed of going into space, or flying planes. When I was about 11 my friends started getting Sinclair

7 min read

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HAProxy
HAProxy
NGINX vs HAProxy — a bit like comparing a 2CV with a Tesla? Malcolm Turnbull
As I design, build and sell load balancers based on LVS and HAProxy, it’s in my interests to combat the avalanche of NGINX+ marketing propaganda that I've seen over the last year. Let's call it an attempt to skewer fake news.

3 min read

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Reviews and Comparisons
JetNEXUS (EdgeNEXUS) review and Kemp comparison Malcolm Turnbull
You can check directly what customers having been telling Gartner about Loadbalancer.org, JetNexus, Barracuda Networks and Kemp Technologies on the new PeerInsights platform.

8 min read

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Security
Security
Security through obscurity - double login protection made easy... Malcolm Turnbull
Security through obscurity is not a great idea when it is your ONLY protection technique. For example moving your SSH port from 22 -> 23 won't fool any hackers for long! However, I've always liked putting a 'double login' in front of important web sites to frustrate simple automated hacking tools.

3 min read

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Reviews and Comparisons
Reviews and Comparisons
15 reasons why you don't need a load balancer Malcolm Turnbull
OK time for another embarrassing confession, "For the last 15 years Loadbalancer.org has never needed to use a load balancer!" But that all changed when some hacker decided to attack our website.

5 min read

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Just for Fun
Just for Fun
Did you fall for our April Fool? Malcolm Turnbull
So we had a fun weekend - and yes we played a little April fool...Well, it started as an April Fool. We've left the original blog below just so you can have a read

2 min read

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How-To's
How-To's
Vendor lock-in sucks: How do I leave my cloud software provider? Malcolm Turnbull
As a business owner, I love being able to rent software solutions in the cloud. It's flexible, fast to deploy and evaluate, easy to scale, and there's no large up-front capital investment. But what happens

4 min read

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Reviews and Comparisons
Do you remember when you could get fired — for not buying F5? Malcolm Turnbull
You might not be old enough to remember the highly effective marketing campaign from IBM, that implied buying from anyone else would get you fired... However, I just read Kemp Technologies mildly amusing press release

3 min read

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News
News
Loadbalancer.org buys new head office building in Portsmouth Malcolm Turnbull
Loadbalancer.org is 13 years old, and we thought it was about time we bought our very own office building! Anyone who has visited our current UK office at the Technopole Portsmouth, will understand why

2 min read

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Reviews and Comparisons
How should you compare load balancers? Malcolm Turnbull
If you are searching on Google for load balancer comparisons, as I just did, you will come across some blatant sales pitches from various vendors. They use dubious figures to prove that they are better

9 min read

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Reviews and Comparisons
What are the best load balancing methods and algorithms? Malcolm Turnbull
This kind of question was asked a lot more frequently ten years ago, usually followed by the second most common question: "Why do I need two load balancers?" In fact, we were asked

10 min read

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Just for Fun
Just for Fun
Times they are a Changin’ Malcolm Turnbull
Times they are a Changin’ If your time to you Is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For times they are a-changin. Bob Dylan’s lyrics in

2 min read

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Denial of Service
Blocking invalid range headers using ModSecurity and/or HAProxy (MS15-034 - CVE-2015-1635) Malcolm Turnbull
Microsoft quietly patched a fairly nasty little bug (MS15-034) in IIS last month: A simple HTTP request with an invalid range header field value to either kill IIS, reveal data or remotely execute code! We

4 min read

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Denial of Service
Denial of Service
Simple Denial of Service DOS attack mitigation using HAProxy Malcolm Turnbull
Denial of Service (DOS) attacks can be especially effective against certain types of web application. If an application is highly dynamic or database-intensive it can be remarkably simple to degrade or cripple the functionality of

4 min read

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HAProxy
HAProxy
Black Friday black out protection with HAProxy Malcolm Turnbull
The media industry had lots of fun at the expense of e-commerce outlets on Black Friday mercilessly reporting on site crashes and outages. My wife yelled that I needed to 'fix the Internet' when Argos.

3 min read

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Top 10 Blogs
Top 10 Blogs
Loadbalancer.org product roadmap — new features, release notes and more (as always, a work in progress) Malcolm Turnbull
Understandably, we get quite a few requests for a product roadmap containing release notes and feature updates. We've had a chat about this internally and thought that it would be nice to have a permanent

9 min read

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HAProxy
Open Source Windows service for reporting server load back to HAProxy (load balancer feedback agent). Malcolm Turnbull
In general when you are load balancing a cluster you can evenly spread the connections through the cluster and you get pretty consistent and even load balancing. However with some applications such as RDS (Microsoft

6 min read

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Disaster Recovery
Some small changes to default settings make achieving high availability easier... Malcolm Turnbull
Loadbalancer.org has always been about high-availability, that is the fundamental reason for our products existence. Performance has always been a nice side effect while maintainability of your application cluster is generally a key sub-set

4 min read

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HAProxy
What do you mean my pipe is saturated? Malcolm Turnbull
Some of the most common questions we get at Loadbalancer.org are performance related. It is quite difficult to give a straight answer to these questions as the real answer is the slightly unsatisfactory, "

2 min read

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Linux
Look, why can't you just tell me how many people are connected to the load balancer? Malcolm Turnbull
I must confess, at certain times it has looked like open warfare would break out between the support team and development team at Loadbalancer.org over the last few months. One reason being that a

6 min read

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Microsoft
Microsoft
Exchange 2013 - Microsoft finally have an email solution designed for high availability and load balancing Malcolm Turnbull
OK, So maybe my blog title is a little harsh. The Microsoft Exchange products have been pretty scaleable since Exchange 2007. Exchange 2010 had some vast improvements and you could tell that the Microsoft engineers

3 min read

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Web Application Firewall (WAF)
For any poor sod who needs to deal with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Malcolm Turnbull
Any engineer dealing with PCI DSS compliance issues probably looses a little bit of the joy in life :-). Now don't get me wrong, The PCI DSS has a laudable aim and is written quite

4 min read

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HAProxy
Load Balancer performance: Benchmarking HAProxy on EC2 (Quick and Dirty Style) Malcolm Turnbull
Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks.... I get quite frustrated with benchmarks because they are very hard to perform properly, and even when you do them properly its very hard to get any useful data from

2 min read

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Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
GSLB - Why do Global Server Load Balancers suck? Malcolm Turnbull
OK, Before the flames start let me state the usual caveat, "GSLBs don't ALWAYS suck, just most of the time". Here at Loadbalancer.org we have toyed with the idea of selling a GSLB (as most of our competitors do), it wouldn't take long...

3 min read

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