In this rare situation, you may find yourself unable to cluster your ZXTM's together. This will affect a limited number of our customers who are using switches that do not support IGMPv2. ZXTM 4.1 changes the IGMP version used to traverse multicast packets between clusters. If your switch is unable to support this protocol you will experience this error:

The following problems occurred while finishing the wizard:
 
    * * ERROR: Failed to join cluster!

To resolve this, the following needs to be performed on all ZXTM's in your cluster.

Within $ZEUSHOME/zxtm/conf/settings.cfg:

flipper!multicast_version 0

You then must reboot the machine.

When the box is rebooted, and ZXTM reloaded, you can check to see which multicast version is being used by looking at "/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/force_igmp_version" (it should be '0') The above advice will revert ZXTM's multicast behaviour to that of 4.0 - you will now be able to successfully cluster your ZXTM's.

If ZXTM throws up this error:

ERROR: Failed to import Certificate (Private key must not be encrypted)

Then you can use openssl to decrypt your private key, enabling ZXTM to parse it.

openssl rsa -in /path/to/private.key -outform PEM -out /plain/format.key

ZXTM allows you to easily and efficiently control which source IP ranges are allowed to access your website. This could be really useful within an intranet environment where only specific IP ranges of your business are allowed access.

A quick trafficscript such as the below accomplishes this. Read more...

Many sites are now https only, banking, e-commerce, shopping, and many more. However, end users are not always willing to remember prefixing their request with https:// -- indeed, they never need to as ZXTM and trafficscript provides a simple server solution! Read more...

Here's how to accomplish vanity domain names within ZXTM. Many popular websites will respond to a http://domain-name.com/ request, but will issue a 301 re-direct to http://www.domain-name.com/. Let's demonstrate how ZXTM can quickly and easily accommodate this requirement, including transparently re-writing any URL request. Read more...

There are in fact two ways that ZXTM can produce ICMP Echos.

One way to generate pings to your back-end(s)is to apply a ping health monitor, that periodically pings the nodes of the pool to which it is applied, in order to determine whether these nodes are alive. Read more...

Overview

Increasingly, our modern-day workforce requires upward-mobility. It follows that a businesses infrastructure requirements are radically changing to suit their employees' needs. Zeus' Extensible Traffic Manager was designed to co-exist in a mobile environment; sustaining, securing and accelerating the infrastructure a work-force requires to reliably conduct business day-to-day.

It's important for Zeus to clarify exactly how node-draining is handled internally. The draining of a node instructs the virtual server to no longer:

• Balance any client connections not requiring the use of a draining pool.

In practice, this means that when session persistence is applied across a pool, incoming connections that have been assiged a persistence class (by way of the pool's chosen session persistence method) will always be directed accordingly. This can result in a situation where even if a node is in a draining state, connections can, and will, still be balanced to it.

Should you wish to disable this behaviour, you will need to change or remove the session persistence class assigned to the draining node.

Many of our customers are running FreeBSD enterprise deployments. ZXTM fully supports operation on a BSD based Operating System. Being a UNIX, there are a number of kernel tunings we can perform to increase the performance and efficiency of ZXTM when deployed on the stable environment BSD offers. Read more...

The Payment Card Industry, including Visa and Mastercard, require banks, merchants and Member Service Providers to protect cardholder information by adhering to a strict set of security standards. The Payment Card Industry security standard (PCI) includes MasterCard's Site Data Protection (SDP) program and Visa's Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP).

A fundamental requirement of importing a certificate into ZXTM is that the certificate file and the private key file be in PEM format.

Windows Server is only able to export a private key file in .pfx format. Thus, we must use the program OpenSSL to perform the conversion for us.

This is a problem usually encountered by customers who are configuring their ZXTM software/appliance offline, then transporting it, fully configured, to their datacentre to be made live.

ZXTM verifies IP-bound licence keys by confirming that the IP address in the licence key is raised on a network interface that is physically connected to a switch/router and has an active link (i.e. ifconfig reports its state as RUNNING). Read more...

By default, ZXTM's installer calls your operating system's default text viewer - in most cases, 'less'.

To proceed past the agreement, press 'q', then type 'accept' followed by a carriage return.

Zeus Technology would like to make its customers aware of the following Sun Microsystems advisory: http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-101763-1 Read more...

If you wish to change the IP address your licence key is bound to please download, fill in and fax back to us a request change form.

When we have processed the form we shall inform you at which point you can download a new license key from your Customer Pages

Please note: to update your key details you must have a valid support contract or maintenance support.