IP Transparency with the ZXTM software

The ZXTM appliance has long supported full IP transparency, and we've successfully completed our beta program for the ZXTM software support. The IP transparency module is now fully supported for all customers and evaluators running ZXTM or ZXTM LB as software on a supported Linux system.

The following only applies to customers and evaluators running ZXTM 4.0 or later on a supported Linux system (kernels 2.6.8.1 to 2.6.24). IP Transparency is included in the ZXTM Appliances (2000/5000/7000/7400/VA).

Why use the IP Transparency module?

Without IP transparency, all requests that ZXTM passes to the back-end servers appear to come from one of the ZXTM server’s' IP addresses. The true client IP address isn’'t directly available to the back end servers. A back end application needs to inspect the 'X-Cluster-Client-Ip' header that ZXTM adds to each HTTP request, or use one of the IP transparency application modules.

The IP transparency module makes the server-side connections which originate from ZXTM appear to originate directly from the remote client.

Obtaining the IP Transparency module

Download:	Kernel Module installer
Instructions:	Installation Guide

Configuration

IP Transparency requires that you change the routing configuration on each back-end server. Section 2.4: 'IP Transparency' in the ZXTM User Manual describes the configuration changes in detail.

Changes

1.5 - 1st May 2008

Support kernels 2.6.8 -> 2.6.24

1.4 - 6th September 2007

Fix a memory leak (introduced in version 1.3).

1.3 - 6th July 2007

Support kernels 2.6.8 -> 2.6.21
UDP Transparency is now supported (using ZXTM 4.2)

1.2 - 18th December 2006

Support kernels 2.6.8 -> 2.6.19

1.0 - 7 April 2006

Support TCP transparency
Support kernels 2.6.8 -> 2.6.15

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 12 April 2006

4 comments

Comments:

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Comment from: Stuart Shelton [Zeus Support] · http://blog.srcshelton.dyndns.info/

For those customers running Gentoo Linux (or indeed any distribution which uses Portage for its package management system) I've packaged an ebuild to automatically install the ZXTM Transparency module and, via Gentoo's moduledb system, keep the installed module up to date even if the kernel version changes.

The archive containing the ebuild scripts are available from here:

http://files.gentoo-tools.homeunix.net/zxtm/zxtm-modules.tar.bz2

Please note that these ebuild scripts are not supported in any way by Zeus Technology - they are merely provided as a courtesy to customers who might find them a time-saver compared to the full official installer.

To install and use these ebuild scripts:

Download the archive at the above location;
Ensure that PORTDIR_OVERLAY is defined in /etc/make.conf - this would usually be set to /usr/local/portage, for example. If creating this directory from scratch, it should be owned by portage:portage;
untar the archive into this directory to create, for example, /usr/local/portage/net-misc/zxtm-modules/;
Download the ZXTM IP Transparency installer from Zeus at the above location, and copy it into /usr/portage/distfiles/;
As root, run the command "emerge -v zxtm-modules";
Carefully read any instructions output by the ebuild, and perform any necessary further actions.

Once the zxtm-modules package is installed, you can ensure that it is always active for your current kernel by simply running "modules-rebuild" as root.

12 April 2006 @ 18:05

Comment from: Nigel Nazir [Visitor]

Any chance this be available for Solaris 10 in the future?

31 August 2006 @ 16:57

Comment from: Gustavo Baratto [Visitor]

Yeah. A solaris version would be great here!

14 June 2007 @ 01:00

Comment from: Ben Argyle [Visitor]

Indeed, this is something we would very much like to see.

05 September 2007 @ 16:28

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