- Managing SMTP traffic
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Chatty protocols with long-lived connections, such as SMTP, can be difficult to inspect and manage because the conversation is very unpredictable. Malicious clients can work around filters by deliberately fragmenting messages, or sending multiple message lines simultaneously. This article shows you how to build an SMTP protocol handler that reassembles and synchronises the messages, making it much easier to then build content filtering policies.
- Handling traffic spikes from abusive referrers
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What happens if your website (or another one on the same hosting system) gets slashdotted? Legitimate users can't get through in the flash-flood that ensues. This article uses TrafficScript™ to build a solution that counts the rate of new users from each referrer, and starts bandwidth-limiting users if a site refers too much traffic.
- Stop Bandwidth Theft!
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Another referer-checking example - you can use TrafficScript™ or the RuleBuilder™ to detect users trying to 'steal' your content and cost you bandwidth.
- Hiding application errors
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What can you do if one of your application servers starts returning errors? A short TrafficScript™ rule can detect the unwanted response and tell ZXTM to retry the user's request against another server in your farm.
- Tracking login attempts and detecting password reuse
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By tracking how frequently a user account is accessed from different locations, you can pin down possible password sharing, which is a real revenue-stealer for paid-for content sites. ZXTM and TrafficScript™ give you just the tools you need to build such a solution.
- No more "404 Not Found..."
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Rather than giving each user a sorry "404 Not Found" apology page, how about trying to send each user to a more useful page? The TrafficScript™ example in this article shows you how to intercept error messages like 404's and mask them from the user by redirecting the user transparently to an alternative page.
- Copyright 2006?
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How can you automatically rewrite the copyright dates on all of your web pages, so that they're always correct? This article shows you how.
- Adding meta-tags to a website with ZXTM
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Meta-tags are used by some search engines (e.g. Yahoo!) to help then to build your site index. This article shows you how to insert meta tags on-the-fly, without having to modify any of your content.
- ZXTM Spider Catcher
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Fed up with badly-written web spiders overrunning your site? With ZXTM's Request Rate shaping, and a little TrafficScript, you can easily pin them down and keep them under control.
- Traffic Valuation and Prioritization
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Some users may dominate your service, at the expense of other users who want to make valuable transactions. This can result in an unintentional (or even intentional) Denial of Service attack.
This article describes a range of ways to classify your users, and then apply different prioritization techniques to ensure that your valuable users get the best possible levels of service.
- How to... launch a website at 5am
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We had to launch some new website content at 5am (the article explains why!). With a simple bit of TrafficScript, we were able to test and review our new web content internally before the release, and make the new content live at 5am while everyone slept soundly in their beds.
- Using Google Analytics on your web site - the easy way!
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Google Analytics is a great tool for monitoring and tracking visitors to your web sites. To get it working, you need to embed a small fragment of JavaScript code in every web page.
Of course, ZXTM gives you a very easy way to do this, irrespective of whether your content is static, dynamic, in a database, compressed - whatever!
- Embedding RSS data using a TrafficScript rule
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Many services use RSS feeds to distribute frequently updated information like news stories and status reports. ZXTM's powerful TrafficScript language lets you process RSS XML data, and this article describes how you can embed several RSS feeds into a web document.
It illustrates ZXTM's response rewriting capabilities, XML processing and its ability to query several external datasources while processing a web request.
- Sending custom error pages from ZXTM
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If every single one of your servers goes down, what can you do? This article describes how to configure your Traffic Manager to host content-rich error pages for you.
- Integrating Google Search
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Need to replace a component of your web site? In this demonstration, we show how to cut out the search facility on a website, replacing it entirely and transparently with a search system built from Google's SOAP-based search API.
