ZXTM KnowledgeHub

IP Transparency 1.5 released

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:57:54 +0000

On the 1st May 2008 version 1.5 of the ZXTM Software IP Transparency module was released. Read more...

Getting the best out of ZXTM and ESX

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:00:00 +0000

VMware ESX and ZXTM VA (ZXTM Virtual Appliance) are a great combination and to ensure that you get the best out of the product a few tweaks need to be made once ZXTM has been imported into ESX. Read more...

On-hold music for your website

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:23:45 +0000

Everyone knows that web surfers want snappy web sites, with fast loading times and quick responses. ZXTM™ has all kinds of whizzy features to accelerate your web site. But even then, sometimes you will have to cope with the odd slow and complicated request. How do you keep your web pages feeling snappy, and more importantly, keep that potential customer glued to your site? Read more...

Why ZXTM #3: Faster, more responsive applications

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:10:06 +0000

"700% improvement in application response times... we can measure a 400% improvement in performance... we’ve measured nearly a 600% increase in transactions serviced on the same hardware!"

How does adding ZXTM to your application delivery infrastructure produce these performance gains? In this article, we’ll describe some of the technologies in ZXTM that extract more performance, responsiveness and capacity from your networked applications. Read more...

List running Virtual Servers using Ruby and SOAP

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:00:58 +0000

The following code uses ZXTM's Control API to list all the running virtual servers on a cluster. The code is written in Ruby. Read more...

Scaling Citrix Secure Gateway

Brian Cowe [Zeus Systems Engineering] — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:45:25 +0000

Deployments using Citrix Web Interface and Presentation Server often have a Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) as their single point of contact for connections. Whilst this gives a convenient entry point, no scaling technology is built in, meaning that any such system is bound by the SSL performance of a single CSG. This article shows how to scale a CSG deployment, achieve high availability and better performance. Read more...

ZXTM 4.2r2 released

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:00:00 +0000

ZXTM 4.2r2 was released on 18th February 2008 via customers' download pages and is now available for evaluation. Read more...

How do I import ZXTM VA into VMware ESX 3.5

John Laide [Zeus Systems Engineering] — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:10:39 +0000

This FAQ describes how to import ZXTM VA (ZXTM Virtual Appliance), version 4.2, into VMware ESX 3.5. Read more...

How do I configure ZXTM with Firefox 3?

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:19:21 +0000

There can't be many people who haven't heard of the Firefox web browser. If you have never used it before, we can highly recommend giving it a try. It's faster, safer, and just so much friendlier than Internet Explorer.

If you are on the cutting edge of web browsers, you might have tried the new betas of Firefox 3. And if you've used Firefox 3 with ZXTM, you'll notice that there have been some changes to the way Firefox handles secure sites. This is similar to the changes seen in Internet Explorer 7 - and we have a KnowledgeHub article explaining those changes too. Read more...

Why ZXTM? #2: Deeper intelligence with TrafficScript

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:45:33 +0000

Juniper recently pulled out of the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market because they found it increasingly difficult to differentiate their DX product from competitors’ devices.

TrafficScript™ is one of the key features that differentiate ZXTM from almost all other ADC devices available today. It gives you the power to make your traffic management device handle traffic in precisely the way that you want. Read more...

Why ZXTM? #1: Scalability and Managability

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:41:22 +0000

Why do customers use ZXTM to manage application traffic? There’s a number of reasons – its deep, programmable inspection and intelligence, its ability to make applications run faster and give them more capacity, and the unique range of deployment options. Read more...

Managing Website Growth

Dec [Zeus Dev Team] — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:18:53 +0000

As websites grow, the structure of their URLs can change dramatically. This makes things much more manageable from an operational point of view, but what can be done about all of those links people have to that website? Ideally, we would like to ensure that people with the old link are presented the most relevant content on the new website. When the web-application is large or under the control of a different department, it may be difficult to change things. Well TrafficScript™ comes to the rescue once again. Read more...

Converting Snort Rules to TrafficScript

Matt H [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:43:34 +0000

Snort is a popular open source intrusion detection system that analyzes network traffic in order to detect patterns (stored as a set of rules) that could possibly be malicious. ZXTM's TrafficScript™ has the ability to read and manipulate HTTP traffic, so we can use the Snort's well tested rules library and TrafficScript to turn ZXTM into a lightweight intrusion detection system for the HTTP servers behind it. Read more...

Deleting Session Persistence records

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:43:31 +0000

Clever code elsewhere on the web: on the zeus-users.org community, someone recently asked if it were possible to delete a session persistence entry.

The code sample in one of the responses describes how to do this by managing a client cookie that indexes the user session, deleting the cookie when you wish to drop the session persistence entry.

Zeus-Users.org community

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:59:39 +0000

One of our key partners recently created a forum to discuss Zeus products - ZXTM, ZXTM GLB and ZWS. Like all communities, it will take time to grow, but take a look at zeus-users.org some time soon.

Zeus Communities

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:51:39 +0000

The zeus-users.org community is an independent community for users of Zeus software - ZXTM, ZXTM GLB and ZWS. Read more...

How do I run my ZXTMs in Active-Active mode?

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:27:10 +0000

Each traffic IP address is raised on one of the ZXTM systems in the cluster. If you configure a Traffic IP group with several IP addresses, the ZXTMs will share these IPs addresses evenly between themselves. Read more...

Load-balancing an Enterprise Service Bus

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:39:37 +0000

There's a great article by Lori MacVittie over at F5's DevCentral describing the case for load-balancing your Enterprise Service Bus: Load Balancing as an ESB Service. As load balancers get more sophisticated and SOA is more widely deployed, architects are beginning to realize how the great things a traffic manager can do for a website can be used deep within an SOA application as well. Read more...

Using ZXTM as a Forward Proxy

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:31:20 +0000

ZXTM 4.2 contains a new feature, called 'Forward Proxy Mode'. But what is a Proxy? A reverse proxy? A forward proxy? And what can you do with such a feature? Read more...

Why am I having startup issues on SLES?

Dec [Zeus Dev Team] — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:16:05 +0000

Upgrading from SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) version 9.x to version 10.x has a side effect of altering the order that startup scripts are run. This can result in ZXTM being started before the networking on the machine has been initialized and can result in issues including ZXTM reporting itself as being unlicensed.

It is also possible for this problem to occur if you have turned ZXTM off then on again via the chkconfig command. Read more...

Geographic location detection using TrafficScript

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:30:55 +0000

Sometimes you may want to determine the country of origin of each remote client so that you can act on this information using TrafficScript™. This article describes how to use Maxmind's free GeoLite Country database within ZXTM to determine a client's geographic location from their source IP address. Read more...

ZXTM GLB 2.1 Manual and Release Notes

Julian [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:50:51 +0000

The ZXTM GLB (ZXTM Global Load Balancer) manual introduces the ZXTM GLB software, describing deployment considerations, the installation procedure and common configurations for disaster recovery and load-balancing scenarios.

Download the ZXTM GLB 2.1 Manual [pdf]
Download the ZXTM GLB 2.1 Release Notes
Download the ZXTM GLB 2.1 README, including upgrade instructions

ZXTM Global Load Balancer 2.1 released

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:48:26 +0000

ZXTM GLB 2.1 was released on 13th September 2007 via customers' download pages and is now available for evaluation. Read more...

IP Transparency 1.4 released

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:56:22 +0000

On 6th September 2007 version 1.4 of the ZXTM Software IP Transparency module was released. Read more...

ZXTM 4.2r1 released

Crispin Flowerday [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:57:15 +0000

ZXTM 4.2r1 was released on 6th September 2007 via customers' download pages and is now available for evaluation. Read more...

Managing XML SOAP data with TrafficScript

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:37:49 +0000

SOA applications need just as much help as traditional web applications when it comes to reliability, performance and traffic management. Zeus' SDC and SON white papers cover this in detail, but this article jumps straight in with four down-to-earth TrafficScript™ examples to show you how you can inspect the XML messages and manage SOA transactions. Read more...

Synchronizing SMTP

Julian [Zeus Dev Team] — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:22:22 +0000

If you wish to use ZXTM to inspect or modify the headers or body of SMTP messages, you need to write some TrafficScript™ to synchronize the two halves of the conversation, to ensure that the connection doesn't stall. This article explains how to do this, and presents an example TrafficScript rule that can be used as the basis of more advanced SMTP rules. Read more...

Hex-encoded URLs, TrafficScript, and All That

michael [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:06:31 +0000

This article examines how legitimate URLs are built, how malicious URLs can be made harder to detect by hexadecimal encoding, and, of course, how ZXTM and TrafficScript can be used to reject them anyway. Read more...

Detecting and Managing Abusive Referers

Mark Boddington [Zeus Systems Engineering] — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:26:37 +0000

Popular news and blogging sites such as Slashdot and Digg have huge readerships. They are community driven and allow their members to post articles on various topics ranging from hazelnut chocolate bars to global warming. These sites, due to their massive readership, have the power to generate huge spikes in the web traffic to those (un)fortunate enough to get mentioned in their articles. Fortunately ZXTM and TrafficScript™ can help. Read more...

How do I connect ZXTM software to external SSL hardware?

Chris Boyle [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:51:08 +0000

ZXTM 4.2 or later can connect to external SSL hardware using the PKCS#11 standard (if you're using a ZXTM appliance, see the appliance version of this article). This can improve the security of your SSL private keys, using a device such as an nCipher NetHSM (which can generate keys and perform ZXTM's cryptographic operations such that the keys never leave the NetHSM). Alternatively, you could use this feature to connect to a locally attached SSL accelerator to improve performance.

You will need an appropriate PKCS#11 library provided by your SSL hardware vendor, to translate between the PKCS#11 API and the specifics of that vendor's hardware. The nCipher Support Software includes such a library (libcknfast.so in the "pkcs11" bundle) which will connect to whatever nCipher hardware has been configured in the Support Software. Read more...

How do I connect a ZXTM Appliance to an nCipher NetHSM?

Chris Boyle [Zeus Dev Team] — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:51:07 +0000

You can improve the security of your SSL private keys by connecting an appliance running ZXTM 4.2 or later to an nCipher NetHSM using the PKCS#11 standard (if you're not using an appliance, see the software version of this article). Keys generated on the NetHSM need never leave it: ZXTM can use these keys and their associated certificates for SSL decryption in virtual servers just like standard keys, by delegating all cryptographic operations that require the private key to the NetHSM over a secure network connection. Read more...

Stop bandwidth theft!

Ben [Zeus Dev Team] — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:03:46 +0000

Bandwidth can be expensive. So it can be annoying if other websites steal your bandwidth from you. A common problem is when people use 'hot-linking' or 'deep-linking' to place images from your site on to their own pages. Every time someone views their website, you will pick up the bandwidth tab.

So how can this be stopped? Read more...