1. TCP/IP balancing for SMTP relay,

2. High availability for MySQL

3. High availability for membership websites

4. Balancing load across our many varnishcache caching servers.

Below is a simple step by step how to assuming you have a Centos or Redhat Enterprise linux server, I haven't covered firewalling that should be handled seperatelty and I assume the readers comfort with Linux in this regard.

Once you're at the linux shell as root perform the following

type make

If no make is installed  yum install make

• cd /tmp
• wget http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.4/src/haproxy-1.4.19.tar.gz
• tar -zxf haproxy-1.4.19.tar.gz 
• cd haproxy-1.4.19
• make "TARGET=linux26 USE_PCRE=1"
• mv haproxy /usr/sbin/
• wget http://www.pixl8.co.uk/downloads/haproxy.init.txt
• mv haproxy.init.txt /etc/init.d/haproxy
• chmod +x /etc/init.d/haproxy
• chkconfig --add haproxy
• chkconfig haproxy on
• wget http://www.pixl8.co.uk/downloads/haproxy.cfg.txt
• mv haproxy.cfg.txt /etc/haproxy.cfg
• service start haproxy

 You will have a standard config that is proxying www.cnn.com, you can test this by adding www.cnn.com to your hosts file and pointing it at your HAProxy server IP of course need to edit the haproxy config file to reflect your server environment but the config piece is straightforward, make sure you restart haproxy on config changes using

service haproxy restart

There is a console set to listen on port 8080 the password details are in the sample config if you use it you should change them to your own values.

At Pixl8 we've been building intranets for many years and have always advocated single-sign-on or ensuring that once a user logs into their machine they don't have to login to the intranet as well, it knows who they are from their machine login and personalises their experience accordingly.

Traditionally our intranet product worked with Windows Active directory and Microsoft exchange shared calendars however we can't take that for granted any more and have recently started a project to work with Novell LDAP and now we're seeing clients increasingly embrace technologies like Google Apps, hence we're pleased to announce that Intranet Connect 1.5 supports authentication against the Google Apps suite, so thats login, docs and calendars. Of course our solution can be either hosted on-premise or in the cloud too.

For more information about Intranet connect check out our Intranet connect products page

Yes it seems we're approaching that time of year where projects are either being planned to a delivery before the Christmas period or the client and the Pixl8 team are starting to think about that brief break before enthusiastically re-commencing after the holiday period.

Presently we're finishing off amongst other things

1. A large online membership retention project

2. A Microsoft dynamics integrated membership website

3. Two higher education college websites which have some lovely creative pieces to them

4. A mobile website project

5. A site for a London property developer

6. A video portal using brightcove.com

Pixl8 has had a fantastic 2011 and we've got some really exciting projects to work on next year plus our largest contract to date.

Pixl8 has been an avid user of ColdFusion since the late 90's when I used an early version for my University Dissertation. Since then we've gone through many versions and I used to train the formal Macromedia now Adobe certified curriculum. Back in 2005 we started using alternatives Bluedragon.net and now we're a massive fan of Open Bluedragon.

Whats special about version 2.0 ?

Open Bluedragon 2.0 has finally been released and we've been using the latest bleeding edge nightly builds in some specific cool projects for some 6 months now. The Open BD team has really pulled out all the stops and delivered some very elegant features.

Some of my particular favourites are

1. CFSMTP (Write Mail based applications that process Mail and respond accordingly, we'll be sharing details of how we're leveraging this killer feature soon!)

2. CFMAIL call backs for better mail handling

3. Awesome deep json support

4. Server-side JQuery style selectors using the JSOUP libraries and exposed as a simple HTML() function

5. Server side inline Javascript <cfscript language="javascript">

6. Server side inline Java <cfscript language="java">

These last two features means we will now be able to offer developers to write their CMS templates in CFML, Serverside Javascript or Java. I'm currently experimenting with Quercus which would allow us to also provide PHP support.

For more information check out the blog post from Alan Williamson or head over to the project site

I know many agencies naturally try and avoid getting involved in Infrastructure but I'm a believer in understanding all elements of the stack that you build your applications on, the i'll just shove it in the cloud works in theory only.

So when we needed a solution to do load balancing recently rather than go and buy the latest piece of Cisco kit or use our standard KEEPALIVED setup I hunted around.

The interesting challenge was that we wanted to do more than simple IP based load balancing, we needed something which was essentially application aware. Having looked at Zeus which we used back in 2006 for a large University client and discounted it I looked at HAPROXY.

HaProxy is essentially a reverse proxy than can do either TCP or HTTP based load balancing, its super fast and very elegant. We run it up on Centos on some moderate VMs and it hums away using next to no resources.

You can learn more about it here http://haproxy.1wt.eu/

There is a useful monitoring tool here http://feurix.org/projects/hatop/

Needless to say we have it in production for a few clients including a new Social networking startup.

My particular favourite feature is the ability to do rule based sticky sessions which for example only take affect after a user has done a post or based on the existance of certain cookies.

HAProxy plays very nicely with VarnishCache and Ngnix which I'll blog about another time.

Below is a sample web.config which gives a much bigger upload size. Useful for allowing those big uploads to the server even if these days we seem to pump it out to a CDN like Akamai as fast as we receive it.

web.config

Also a useful tip. Any changes or saves to the web.config will automatically result in the application being restarted which is nice, though may cause you to be logged out if you're not using out-of-process sessions.

Here is an interesting URL on the subject

http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/10920_3482216_1

in addition I was looking for a way to do this using a query this only works on SQL Server 2005, i found this query (i forget where) but i modded it so that the actual debug query is excluded from the results.

Some time ago I blogged a post about finding table information from sql server well the query below has proved useful today in working out what tables are used as part of the application i'm analysing.

The following query did the trick and works on SQL Server 2000 and 2005

Update: Very useful, I've already lost track of how many times i've used this.