Cisco IOS Load Balancing for Blue Coat SGOS

Some time ago I used IOS SLB fea­ture on a C6500 to load bal­ance a pair of Blue Coat ProxySG. Here the con­fug­ur­a­tion and some notes.

Blue Coat to Acquire Packeteer-​​Excellent-​​Outcome

Fantastic news! As a long time user of Blue Coat and Packeteer, I am pretty excited about this. The Packeteer traffic man­age­ment tech­no­lo­gies is a long way ahead of the Cisco queueing strategy, and the Blue Coat product set has plenty of fea­tures that hold Cisco at bay in the WAN Acceleration (pre­vi­ously known as Traffic Management.…sigh…queue the […]

Blue Coat ProxySG VIP and Cisco Switches Need Multicast Enabled

You have a pair of shiny new ProxySG boxen that you want to setup in act­ive /​ standby for high avail­ab­il­ity. You con­fig­ure it up and everything seems to work, and then it doesn’t, or other equip­ment on the same net­work exper­i­ences ran­dom problems.

What you are hav­ing is a Multicast prob­lem with your Ethernet switches, most likely your Cisco switches, that has the prob­lem. How to under­stand and solve the prob­lem after the jump.

Delete the X-​​Bluecoat-​​via Header on Your ProxySG

If you have noticed that your Blue Coat ProxySG inserts a HTTP header in every trans­ac­tion, you might want to delete this to reduce inform­a­tion leak­age to pub­lic networks

Checking Connectivity on Your Blue Coat ProxySG

A very simple tool in your Proxy SG to check that you can access resources. It only works for HTTP but it provides a good check. I use this a lot in net­works where ICMP has been dis­abled for security.

Performance of Blue Coat BCAAA Agent for Authentication

A com­mon ques­tion in the Blue Coat for­ums is about the server spe­cific­a­tion for the BCAAA and how many users can be sup­por­ted. While I am not sure sure about the per­form­ance that Blue Coat recom­mends I can tell you my experiences.

Loading Policy Configuration in the Local File

A com­mon ques­tion in the Blue Coat for­ums is “how do I load this con­fig snip­pet into con­fig­ur­a­tion. The ques­tion most often comes from people who are new to SGOS and have been using the Virtual Policy Manager. This quick note shows you how to load a con­fig snip­pet that removes the X-​​Bluecoat-​​Via header

SOCKS Clients That Are Available for Your Blue Coat ProxySG — Update

A short list of SOCKS Clients that I have used or know of
Note that many pro­grams have their own SOCKS cli­ent built in, many FTP cli­ents such as Filezilla, WS FTP, Firefox and so on have built in sup­port. You really need a cli­ent when you have an applic­a­tion that must use a proxy server, but the applic­a­tion does […]