Thought leadership from our community | Insights

Mark Brookes

Mark works as the development manager at Loadbalancer.org. Away from work, Mark plays a lot of Frisbee and enjoys mountain biking. Other hobbies include compiling drivers into the Linux Kernel.
HAProxy
Breaking HAProxy with the help of a Spirent Avalanche and lots of very small packets... Mark Brookes
HAProxy is awesome. So awesome in fact, that here at Loadbalancer.org HQ - I find it very difficult to generate enough load to break it...so let's try harder!

6 min read

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SSL offload testing with HAProxy and Stunnel Mark Brookes
There are a lot of SSL offload throughput statistics available for appliances across the internet but rarely do they detail the way they were tested (probably because a lot of the numbers are inflated for

4 min read

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Updating your Loadbalancer.org hardware to the latest software v8.3 with a USB stick (bare metal restore). Mark Brookes
This blog has been updated. Click here to read the latest version. Sometimes its easier just to do a complete bare metal re-install of your hardware devices to the latest version - rather than running

5 min read

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High Availability
Updating your Loadbalancer.org hardware to the latest software v8.3 with a USB stick (bare metal restore). Mark Brookes
This blog has been updated. Click here to read the latest version. Sometimes its easier just to do a complete bare metal re-install of your hardware devices to the latest version - rather than running

5 min read

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Application Management
Upstart script for Collectd Mark Brookes
We have been doing some internal testing with Collectd. "collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks

1 min read

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How-Tos
NTLM authenticating proxy check script Mark Brookes
We do quite a bit of work with web proxy vendors, load balancing multiple web filters/proxies with our appliances and our customers have requested a way of health checking through the proxy when they

5 min read

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Performance
G-Zip Compression and Load Balancing Mark Brookes
A couple of our customers have asked if our appliances would do G-Zip compression in the past we haven't given it much thought. Then out of the blue a company offered us a card to

5 min read

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How-Tos
Enabling SNAT in LVS (xt_ipvs) and iptables Mark Brookes
The vast majority of layer 4 load balancers use LVS in two-arm NAT mode. In this mode the load balancer can control all traffic and it's also source IP transparent. The disadvantage of NAT mode

3 min read

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Security
Loadbalancer V6 - Recovering From Master Failure Mark Brookes
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

3 min read

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