Smart posts about ZXTM

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.

Mozilla - tweeting the status of their ZXTMs

Matthew Zeier has written a great little script using Perl and SOAP to poll his 5 ZXTMs for bandwidth and connection counts. It records the highest values seen so far, and any time the record is broken, the script triumphantly tweets to @mozdashboard so you can see how busy addons.mozilla.org, versioncheck.addons.mozilla.org and fxfeeds.mozilla.com have become.

Clusterfunk - an ever increasing list of tips

Antony Joyce has a wealth of experience deploying ZXTM for customers in the UK and beyond, and his blog contains many of the hints and tips he's collected:

• Installing ZXTM - a great reference if you're a little rusty on your Linux configuration.

• HTTP Redirects with TrafficScript - Getting bitten by the fact that URLs are treated case insensitively with IIS, here's a reminder to normalize them with string.lowercase() before trying to process them in TrafficScript.

• TrafficScript Debug Tip - TrafficScript doesn't have printf, but log.info() does the same thing. It's a quick and easy way to debug your TrafficScript code, and anything written appears in the automatically-refreshing Event Log viewer in the ZXTM UI (or you can use tail -f as Antony suggests).

• Why ZXTM? - here's a few of the reasons ZXTM fits in the deployments that Antony is responsible for.

There's lots more at www.clusterfunk.co.uk.

Configuring ZXTM LB to load balance to Novell Access Manager

Some instructions on configuring ZXTM LB with Novell Access Manager - very instructive because they illustrate the basic principles of setting up load balancing with almost any service: create your session persistence class, a monitor, one or more pools for your servers, a virtual server to manage client-side traffic, a Traffic IP Group for fault tolerance, then wire them all together.

Getting a small plastic bunny to shout at you in your living room

And finally, the mildly anarchic guys at www.badpenguin.co.uk have wired a ZXTM somewhere out on the wild Internet to a Nabaztag bunny so that whenever the ZXTM throws an event the bunny reacts in a strangely appropriate way.

Cheers!

knowledgehub@zeus.com.

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 01 July 2009