Setting up Zeus Traffic Manager is a simple process; however, there are some configuration settings that should be set up to get the best out of the product and enhance the security and functionality of your site. Read more...

It has been quite some time since my first iZXTM^WiZeus article. I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever get around to part 2. However, the massive Zeus 6.0 release has now been launched. This means that those of us in the Zeus Dev Team have a little more breathing room in our schedules – although we're already hard at work designing and implementing features for the next release! That said, I've managed to squeeze in some time to work on this article in which I present an extension to the previous proof-of-concept: we'll parse the data out of the Zeus Traffic Manager MainIndex page and repackage it for the iPhone web browser. (The Zeus Dev Team has reached 55% iPhone penetration, Android is at 9%. That said, a few of us are certainly tempted by some of the upcoming Android handsets.) Read more...

One of the new features in Zeus 6.0 is the ability for traffic managers in a cluster to share an IP address, and have its incoming connections evenly processed by each machine. This article explains how to get the Linux kernel module required for it to work. Read more...

In this series of articles, I’ve discussed what network-side scripting is, and I’ve described how it can be deployed on three leading traffic management systems to solve two simple problems[1][2]. This final article will cover some advanced applications of network-side scripting. Read more...

TrafficScript is very powerful at manipulating requests and responses, however it can also be used to analyze clients to see what functionality they support. In particular in this article we will look at the TLS Server Name Extension, using TrafficScript to see the percentage of clients that support the feature.

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In this article, we’ll consider how to inspect HTTP responses and mask out sensitive information within. We’ll compare solutions for three leading traffic management systems – Citrix’s Netscaler VPX, F5’s BigIP Local Traffic Manager and Zeus Traffic Manager. Read more...

Network-side scripting is one of the domains of traffic management devices (what Gartner calls 'ADCs'); this article compares how a simple problem can be solved using the three leading traffic managers – Citrix's Netscaler VPX, F5's BigIP and Zeus Traffic Manager. Read more...

This article, the first in a series of four, explains how "Network Side Scripting" should be another technique in your application toolbox. However, why is "putting code on the network" a good idea? Read more...

I've just seen an article on The Register about a new exploit in the wild. Microsoft IIS FTP service is vulnerable to a new exploit, see: Microsoft Security Advisory (975191). Fortunately you can quickly protect your FTP server with just a few lines of TrafficScript. Read more...

As a fun experiment and to highlight ZXTM's flexibility in hosting applications I decided to make ZXTM speak with the help of an API provided by an interesting company Twilio. Read more...

WURFL?! Yes, another acronym: Wireless Universal Resource FiLe The WURFL website expands on this: "You can think of the WURFL as a global database of all devices and their capabilities." Such a database is especially useful in the current mobile device landscape where a vast array of HTML/WML/Flash/AJAX features are implemented differently (or not at all.) In essence, WURFL makes it easier for you to improve the web experience you offer people when they are on the move. Read more...

Here at Zeus, we spend a great deal of time focusing on how to speed up customers' web services. We constantly research new techniques to load balance traffic, optimise network connections and improve the performance of overloaded application servers. The techniques and options available from us (and yes, from our competitors too!) may seem bewildering at times. So I would like to spend a short time singing the praises of one specific feature, which I can confidently say will improve your website's performance above all others - caching your website. Read more...

As is well documented here on the KnowlegeHub, we support the use of Java extensions to manipulate traffic. One of the great things about supporting "Java" is that this really means supporting the JVM platform... which, in turn, means we support any language that will run on the JVM and can access the Java libraries. Declan's article on writing extensions in Scala is a recent example exploiting this fact. Read more...

...Zeus customers protected!

When I got in to the office this morning, I wasn't expecting to read about a new BIND 9 exploit!! So as soon as I'd had my first cup of tea I sat down to put together a little TrafficScript magic to protect our ZXTM customers. Read more...

ZXTM provides a SOAP-based Control API, with an interface clearly defined using a collection of WSDL files. Regrettably, Perl's SOAP::Lite implementation completely ignores WSDL specifications, making the task of communicating with a SOAP service much harder than it should be. This article describes how to call ZXTM's SOAP methods and use SOAP enumerations and structures with SOAP::Lite.

Although we'll concentrate on using SOAP::Lite with ZXTM's Control API, the principles can be applied to other SOAP applications as well. Read more...

Giving a definitive performance statement for our ZXTM software is always a challenge because our customers have an almost infinite choice of platforms to deploy our software on.

We test ZXTM on many different server platforms, and when we see a big speed jump, our Performance Quickref [pdf] gets an update. Intel's Nehalem Xeon processors did just that.

Many businesses today rely on email to communicate with their customers. It’s a useful tool to keep them up-to-date with current news, events, and offers. So it’s more than a little frustrating when a proportion of those messages end up being flagged as spam and never seen by the intended recipient Read more...

This is part 1 in a series covering a fun little project that demonstrates how ZXTM can facilitate the rapid deployment of a new web interface variant. My variant of choice in this instance is a UI that doesn't feel out of place on an iPhone, and my victim is ZXTM's own administrative UI (after all, half the Zeus development team are iPhone carriers now ... and the virus is spreading.) Read more...

Choosing the right load-balancing algorithm can often be difficult as every web application behaves differently. ZXTM offers a wide variety of built-in load-balancing algorithms to overcome this problem, but if none of these suit your needs then you can just design your own! This article shows you how. Read more...

A frequent requirement in TrafficScript is to manage data stored in some sort of table. For example, a user may have a list of redirects they wish to apply, and storing those in a table is generally preferable to hard-coding them into a TrafficScript rule. Read more...

Here's a quick roundup of a few solutions that smart people have built recently with ZXTM!

We've got tweeting, hints and tips for Windows Server installations, 3rd party installation instructions and a strangely hypnotic bunny. Read more...

There has been a lot of talk over the past few years about new and different languages targeting the JVM as their runtime platform. Scala has been one of the most high-profile languages in the JVM vanguard. Most notably, in the past year Twitter has announced that it is migrating away from Ruby on Rails to Scala because of RoR's lack of scalability. Read more...

The newest version of Adobe's ColdFusion server features much improved performance and scalability. Among the host of new features, are Ajax enhancements, .Net integration and an Interactive Debugger for the Eclipse IDE (Great minds think alike). ColdFusion 8 has dramatically improved performance over previous versions. Independent tests by Zeus customers deploying ColdFusion have seen ~50% reduction in response times from the CF server, but as with any web application, intelligent Content-Caching is key to achieving the best performance.. Read more...

Zeus Traffic Manager has lots of great features as a load-balancing proxy for web pages and web apps, and it provides many ways to accelerate your existing web traffic. But have you thought about using Zeus Traffic Manager as a web server, and not just as a proxy?

Read this article to find out how to get rid of your old webservers and simplify your network! Read more...

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the worst nightmare of every web presence. Common wisdom has it that there is nothing you can do to protect yourself when a DDoS attack hits you. Nothing? Well, unless you have ZXTM. Read on to find out how ZXTM helped a customer keep their site available to legitimate users when they came under massive attack from the "dark side". Read more...

In a recent conversation, a user wished to use ZXTM’s rate shaping capability to throttle back the requests to one part of his web site that was particularly sensitive to high traffic volumes (think a CGI, JSP Servlet, or other type of dynamic application). This article describes how you might go about doing this, testing and implementing a suitable limit using Service Level Monitoring, Rate Shaping and some TrafficScript magic. Read more...

When we released ZXTM 5.1, we included a useful benchmarking tool named 'ZeusBench' that we use for our internal performance testing and as a load generation tool on the training courses that we run. Read more...

From the Zeus Blog: some (slightly tongue-in-cheek) career advice on how to become an Application Delivery Architect. What is an Application Delivery Architect? Do they really exist? How might you go about gaining the skills to call yourself one?

From the Zeus Blog: an article describing how software load balancing (i.e. ZXTM) can be used to reduce capital and operational costs in a datacenter by means of its application acceleration capabilities. Don't be mislead into believing that these acceleration benefits require specialized hardware support.

Eclipse is one of the most popular IDEs currently being used to write code. Its slick user interface makes it faster and easier to manage and edit your current software project. The ZXTM plugin allows you to edit your TrafficScript code in Eclipse, making it easier and faster to edit and deploy your rules. Read more...

Content protection is a key concern for many online services, and watermarking downloaded documents with a unique ID is one way to discourage and track unauthorized sharing. This article describes how to use ZXTM to uniquely watermark every PDF document served from a web site with the details of each client. Read more...

Be alerted at the earliest opportunity to a problem with your websites.

This article describes how the new Event Handling feature of ZXTM 5.1 can be used to send a text message to your mobile phone when something critical happens to your services. Read more...