Thought leadership from our community | Insights

Aaron West

Coming from a background assisting companies large and small to get the most from open source solutions. Aaron found joining the support team at Loadbalancer.org a natural progression. Aaron’s interests include distro-hopping, B Movies and quality time spent with his family.
Comparisons
Why tierless support? Aaron West
We’re often asked why we broke the mold with our support team and removed the tiers. Well, I wanted to go into that decision to justify why we did it and why I personally still think it’s really what makes the BEST SUPPORT TEAM in the world a reality at Loadbalancer.org!

3 min read

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Comparisons
Does your F5 migration need a Jenga consultant? Aaron West
Is your F5 so complex you're frightened to touch it, but you want to migrate? Get an expert to help stop your Jenga tower come crashing down.

3 min read

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Performance
Why won't NFSv3 just die already? Aaron West
Why is NFSv3 still so common, when NFSv4 is such a vast improvement?

4 min read

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Performance
Performance
Why won't NFSv3 just die already? Aaron West
Why is NFSv3 still so common, when NFSv4 is such a vast improvement?

4 min read

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Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
Choosing the best option to host across multiple locations or data centers Aaron West
There are loads of options available for hosting applications across multiple sites or data centers. But how do you pick the best one for your needs?

8 min read

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Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
How to train your Web Application Firewall (WAF) Aaron West
Training a WAF can be difficult - but not impossible. Find out how we recommend doing it, and how our tools make the whole process easier.

11 min read

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Security
Security
Healthcare IT should listen to Amazon's Werner Vogels: “Dance Like Nobody’s Watching. Encrypt Like Everyone Is” Aaron West
Find out why Werner Vogels' comments ring especially true for healthcare data.

5 min read

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Cloud & IT Infrastructure
Cloud & IT Infrastructure
AWS Reservations, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances Aaron West
I often hear that AWS seems expensive, in most cases, this is because people are not fully aware of the best cost-saving practices. Amazon offers many tools to help keep costs down and is always working to improve on these. One such recent improvement is the new "AWS Savings Plans".

6 min read

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Open Source
Open Source
Anatomy of a partnership: Working and learning with Smoothwall Aaron West
Loadbalancer.org’s evolving approach to partnerships reflects what’s at the heart of our ethos. The human element builds understanding, and the better we can understand our partners, the better we can meet their needs.

3 min read

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Performance
Load balancing your load balancers for endless scalability Aaron West
As the title suggests, I'm going to take a look at the concept of load balancing a cluster of inexpensive load balancers to scale out SSL capabilities (or even Layer 7 operations), rather than the

3 min read

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Direct Server Return (DSR)
Direct Server Return (DSR) is simply awesome - here’s why... Aaron West
Direct Server Return (DSR) is my favorite way to load balance application servers because it’s simple, transparent and super fast. Direct server return would seem to be a mode that has fallen out of

5 min read

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Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
I've finally found a decent reason to use GSLB! Aaron West
Yes, it's the end of an era... after many years arguing that GSLB has no place on a proper load balancer, I've finally found a solid reason to add one to our product. Yes, you read that right! I've officially surrendered and given you a new GSLB to play with...!

14 min read

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High Availability
High Availability
Enterprise load balancer for Nutanix by Loadbalancer.org Aaron West
Update as of July 2018 Loadbalancer.org load balancers are now certified as Nutanix Ready Nutanix seems to be the next big thing in enterprise virtualization and hyperconvergence, while they've actually been in the market

4 min read

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Direct Server Return (DSR)
Yahoo’s L3 Direct Server Return (DSR), an alternative to LVS-TUN, explored. Aaron West
I had the opportunity to play with Yahoo’s implementation of L3 DSR using LVS and iptables, it was great fun so I thought I had better write a blog on using it. So, what

6 min read

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Direct Server Return (DSR)
Direct Server Return (DSR)
Layer 4 Direct Routing (LVS-DR) and Layer 4 TUN (LVS-TUN) in AWS Aaron West
Have you ever wondered if LVS works in AWS? I can already say for certain that LVS-NAT works great - but what about LVS-DR and LVS-TUN? Having spent the last several months playing in AWS,

6 min read

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How-Tos
How-Tos
Client Certificate Authentication with HAProxy Aaron West
Using client certificates for security is a pretty cool idea! You can protect an entire application or even just a specific Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to only those that provide a valid client certificate.

9 min read

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Security
Security
How to stop web form spam — use a simple honey pot trap in ModSecurity... Aaron West
How frustrating do you find it when hackers or robots fill in your website forms with "Buy Viagra Now!" type spam?

4 min read

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Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
What exactly is a Reverse Proxy? Aaron West
"I don't think we can use your load balancer, because it's not a reverse proxy..." said the slightly confused reseller. Which got me thinking, maybe I should write a blog about the difference

3 min read

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How-Tos
Loadbalancer.org Enterprise VA with oVirt(RHEV) 4.1 Aaron West
I’ve had a fruitful weekend getting up to speed with oVirt the awesome virtualization platform founded by Red Hat. It’s been great fun getting to grips with it’s features making me quite

3 min read

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How-Tos
How-Tos
Loadbalancer.org with Let's Encrypt - quick and dirty! Aaron West
Let’s Encrypt offers us a free way to get SSL certs with the aim to be less complex than our current solutions, hmm... Well that sounds pretty cool! I had known about Let’s

7 min read

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Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
GSLB — Why Global Server Load Balancers don’t always suck? (Polaris-GSLB) Part 2 Aaron West
In part one we were introduced to Polaris-GSLB which is a cool little open source GSLB solution, we went through a simple use case scenario and discussed the features it supports. In part two of this Blog I’m going to show you how to build Polaris-GSLB on CentOS 7.

3 min read

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Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
GSLB – Why Global Server Load Balancers don't always suck? (Polaris-GSLB) Aaron West
Here at Loadbalancer.org we’re not known for being huge fans of GSLB solutions as some of our customers may already know and you can see from a previous blog : [GSLB – Why Do Global Server Load Balancers Suck?](http://www.loadbalancer.org/blog/gslb-why-do-global-server-load-balancers-suck)

4 min read

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Healthcare
Healthcare
I didn't realise NTP was so important for medical imaging systems like PACS and VNA Aaron West
Have you ever looked at the plan for installing a medical imaging system and felt like screaming? I've seen some pretty scary looking network diagrams, sometimes this is because a lot of the kit is

3 min read

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Open Source
How to stop TPROXY when used with HAProxy breaking clients in the real server subnet Aaron West
Dealing with clients coming from the same subnet as the real servers when using Tproxy can be a pain. It creates an issue because once Haproxy is running transparently, it will allow the real server

3 min read

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How-Tos
Supporting two default gateways on your Load balancer with PBR (Policy Based Routing) Aaron West
Occasionally we get asked questions about supporting multiple default gateways. Customers may have our appliance in two networks, each with it’s own gateway to the internet. Alternatively it may just be a big complex

4 min read

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Security
Shell-shocked by shell shock? Bash vulnerability explained Aaron West
Having recovered from the recent Heartbleed vulnerabilities we now have another headline grabbing vulnerability to keep us all busy. First let me say that our product should be perfectly safe and secure unless you've already

1 min read

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Security
Why did my Loadbalancer just fail the PCI compliance test? Aaron West
Let me first say that I'm not really a fan of PCI scanners. It's not so much that I'm anti security scanners but rather that scanning for vulnerabilities based on only the version number a

1 min read

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HAProxy
HAProxy email alerts guide Aaron West
Update As of haproxy-1.6-dev1 it is now possible to send email alerts directly from HAProxy thanks to the excellent work done for us by Simon Horman. To view more details on how to configure

2 min read

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