Latest
When is an ACL not an ACL? When it's an HAProxy ACL...
If you're from a network background or are of a certain age (or both!), you will have come across Access Control Lists or ACLs.
Insights from the load balancer experts
HAProxy
Using Grafana Loki with HAProxy for log aggregation
In today's security-conscious world, logs are crucial for gaining insight into your systems...
How-tos
What is Stunnel and how do you configure it?
Here is another example of a more “exotic” Stunnel configuration. Most people, and rightly so, will ask “but why?”. Well, because we can!..
Automation
Solving the Layer 4 ARP problem on Linux with Ansible
The ARP problem for Layer 4 DR (Direct Routing) mode is something that needs to be solved for each of your Real Servers in the virtual service...
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...
Direct Server Return
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...
Layer 7
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...
How-tos
Simplifying web application security with the Core Rule Set v3
A WAF isn't a magic bullet, but, as part of a defense in depth strategy, a properly configured WAF should catch and stop common, everyday attacks...
Events
The importance of outreach: Introducing students to load balancing
A recent visit to Southampton Solent University...
How-tos
I wonder…Can HAProxy Proxy Protocol fix my Secure Web Gateway routing problem?
All Secure Web Gateways require client IP transparency in order to implement any proper kind of security and authentication. Which can be a real pain if you have a load balancer in the middle...
Security
Apache Log4j vulnerability CVE-2021-44228
The Apache Log4j utility is commonly used for logging requests by millions of Java applications to log error messages. However, recently the critical vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 was discovered in the Apache Log4j library...
High Availability
RSNA 2021 - this year's innovation: tailored high availability
Fast forward to a post-Covid-world (if we can call it that) and in many ways the pandemic has helped us all go back to basics and appreciate what’s important in life...
Healthcare
Lessons from RSNA 2021: Do your medical imaging systems need critical care?
The pain experienced by your support and professional service teams is enormous. Not least because every customer experiences this issue at the same time!..
Microsoft
Considerations for higher education institutions rolling out virtual desktops
There are a number of different types of virtual desktops; two of which rely on virtualization software...
Cloud migration checklist for universities: When and why
For each application, will you 'lift and shift' or rebuild specifically for the cloud? Which applications can't or shouldn't be moved? Do you want separate applications in separate clouds..
Storage
How to harness object storage in banking
Object storage has usurped structured data storage as the superior storage architecture solution. And for good reason...
How-tos
How to extend Net-SNMP for infrastructure monitoring
Monitoring your infrastructure is a crucial task, and (regardless of the software you've chosen) requires you to make use of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)...
High Availability
Why does high availability matter?
If your applications are mission-critical, then high availability is a key risk management play worth investing in...
How our load balancers meet the unique needs of credit unions
Increasingly, credit unions are looking to load balance their applications to offer highly available and more resilient services to their members...
Performance
The importance of adding a load balancer to your test environments
Hands up here who is guilty of making that “simple” code change in a production environment, only to find it has broken some other functionality?..