Load Balance IIS with Microsoft ARR
KB ID 0001573 Problem If you have a lot of IIS servers, and want to load balance between them, then you can either buy a load balancer, or use Microsoft ARR (Application Request Routing). Note: ARR does a lot more than simply load balancing, e.g. it can perform caching, and complex web routing, and even SSL offloading. Here we are just looking at load balancing. I’m going to deploy TWO ARR servers in my DMZ, here I’ve got...
Citrix NetScaler – SSL Offloading
KB ID 0001192 Problem What is SSL Offloading? If you run https services (Note: I say services, this does not have to be a website), the actual security is handled by SSL/TLS, one of the things this does is encrypt the traffic between the client and server. (This is why your online banking and shopping is done over https and not http.) Thats great, but encrypting and decrypting all that traffic takes a lot of processing cycles, if you...
HP Networking ‘ProCurve’ – Trunking / Aggregating Ports
KB ID 0000638 Problem I was lending a hand this week, while my colleague swapped out a lot of switches. I don’t usually deploy a large number of HP switches, so I was surprised when we installed a chassis switch and after patching the fiber links, the Cisco Catalyst switches all got upset and we lost three out of four ping packets. I (wrongly) assumed that STP would be enabled, so I wandered back and pulled the second fiber...