Insights from the load balancer experts

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...

Seamus Toth

• 6 mins

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?..

Scott Weedon

• 4 mins

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!..

Kashim Cooper

• 2 mins

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...

Dave Saunders

• 2 mins

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...

Aaron West

• 6 mins

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...

Jake Borman

• 5 mins

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...

Lea Friend

• 1 min

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...

James Loveday

• 3 mins

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...

Oliver Warren

• 4 mins

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...

Richard Halcrow

• 4 mins

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...

Andrew Howe

• 4 mins

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?..

Oliver Warren

• 3 mins

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...

Oliver Warren

• 3 mins

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...

Lea Friend

• 1 min

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...

Oliver Warren

• 5 mins

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)...

Andrew Howe

• 3 mins

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...

Malcolm Turnbull

• 2 mins

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...

Andrew Howe

• 7 mins

Events

The importance of outreach: Introducing students to load balancing

A recent visit to Southampton Solent University...

Andrew Howe

• 2 mins

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...

Neil Stone

• 4 mins

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...

Damian Pacuszka

• 3 mins

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...

Jake Borman

• 6 mins

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!..

George Booth

• 3 mins

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...

Harrison Rockensuss

• 4 mins