Latest
How to set up and manage an F5 in the ADC Portal
As an F5 engineer, they asked me to test the product and share my honest thoughts.
Insights from the load balancer experts
Storage
Load balancing Weka is no longer optional — the new normal is 100X faster
Within the space of a few years our customers are demanding increases in performance and capacity — not just 10X, but 100X!..
Healthcare
Help! Our legacy modalities are awesome — but they don't understand DNS!
Connecting remote sites to central data centers necessitates GSLB. But implementation for legacy modalities isn't straightforward...
GSLB
Complete guide to DNS load balancing: Choosing the right method for your applications
DNS is a naming convention that translates human-readable web addresses into IP-addresses, and vice versa...
Use Case
How Loadbalancer.org helped deliver PACS high availability for a group of large enterprise hospitals in the Middle East
As with the majority of Loadbalancer.org's projects in the Middle East, the goal of this project was to help a group of hospitals achieve highly available medical imaging systems...
High Availability
The dangers of not having a high availability setup for your load balancer — as well as your applications!
Why do you need TWO load balancers?..
WAF
Handling large requests with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) while avoiding Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
Sometimes, we need to pass unusually large HTTP requests through our WAF stack...
Media
Why load balancing will be a key (albeit hidden) component of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee
The focus will very much be on re-living all that's happened to the royal family in those 70 years. But that means digging deep into the media archives.....
HAProxy
How to rate limit with HAProxy Stick Tables and the WAF
A while ago I was asked if it would be possible to apply some general rate limiting in HAProxy and the WAF, in order to help prevent DOS-style attacks on a customer's servers...
Security
What can we learn from the recent F5 security vulnerability?
F5 recently announced a critical security vulnerability, allowing an attacker to bypass its iControl REST authentication, and execute commands such as creating or deleting files and disabling services...
Media
Why Chris Moyles' nod to load balancing makes him an official #ADCHero!
On May 11th 2022, I was listening to the awesome Chris Moyles Show, on Radio when a site they were using crashed while they were on air...
High Availability
How to set up email notifications on your Loadbalancer.org appliance
Email notifications are a great way of alerting you to any changes or issues within your load balancer or high availability cluster...
How-tos
When is it right to SSL offload?
It's a fair question, right? Let's take away the strain of SSL terminations from our application servers and let the load balancers deal with it. After all, why would we want to bog down our nifty application with network-level considerations?..
High Availability
What's the point of load balancing?
Load balancing? Say what?! Got 2 mins to get your head around the concept? Your time starts....now!..
Security
Spring Framework vulnerabilities
It is understandable that SysAdmins, DevOps, and most in the IT and Security Departments involved want to ensure all load balancers are fully patched and protected, given that our product plays an important role in their topology...
Comparisons
How many network ports do you need on a hardware load balancer?
The only real reason for separate network ports is physical redundancy. Because the other primary reason (security segregation) can be easily implemented using VLANs...
Open source
Navigating the open source journey: When free is awesome, and why commercial solutions have their place
At Loadbalancer.org, our heroes are open source. And for good reason. Open source software plays an intrinsic part in our company, products, and services...
Security
DoS vulnerability in OpenSSL related to certificate parsing (CVE-2022-0778)
Customers with manually configured, custom client authentication deployments (rare) or using “re-encrypt to backend” to communicate with untrusted third-party servers (very rare) may be impacted...
Performance
Application Acceleration — and why you DON'T need it
As you know, we get excited about solutions, not semantics, so I'm going to go against the grain here and say 'Application Acceleration' is one of those buzzwords that's about as useful as all that designer water that's out there these days...
How-tos
Ever wondered how you can avoid the pain of F5 iRules?
Many things in tech are over-complicated for no reason, and iRules are a prime example of that...
Performance
When should you get a hardware replacement? After 3, 5, or 17 years...?
The topic of hardware replacement, trade-in, and upgrade options is rife with opinions, bad habits, and rules of thumb. It gets even more complicated when you consider how your choices are affected by your vendor's randomly changing end-of-life policies...
Media
Achieving unrivaled performance with media and video streaming on demand
For the uninitiated, layer 4 DR mode is a high performance load balancing method available on our appliances. It works by having all response traffic flow from the servers straight back to the clients...
AWS / Azure / GCP
Expecting growth? Get a load balancer that will always meet expectations
Load balancers are built to help scale up your back end servers, to allow for the growth of users. But what if the load balancer could also grow with you?..
High Availability
The easiest way to reduce downtime — avoid a single point of failure
We get a lot of customers asking to buy a single load balancer. Understandably. One is cheaper than two. But here's why you might want a pair...
Security
PwnKit Vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034)
A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkit's pkexec utility. It is a critical vulnerability because it gives full root privileges to any local user or attacker...
HAProxy
HAProxy ACL rules don't have to be painful with Loadbalancer
We love complex rules. Although, we have seen some pretty scary config files...
Open source
ModSecurity DoS vulnerability (CVE-2021-42717)
All WAF vendors and services using ModSecurity are affected by this vulnerability (unless they have the vulnerable piece of code disabled, by chance)...
Security
Does Niagara Networks have the answer to scaling Secure Web Gateways all the way up to 100G?
Network Security devices such as firewalls, WAF, SWG, IPS etc. are often deployed inline with bridge mode., which has two major problems...