Network Dictionary — Application Delivery Controller

Application Delivery Controller (ADC)  —  The new mar­ket­ing name for a “load bal­an­cer”. Someone put a shiny chrome exhaust and new but­tons on it and so it needed a new mar­ket­ing name. Calling my cof­fee cup a “Liquid Receptacle Device with Enhanced Handling Features” doesn’t change the fact that it holds ocf­fee.
Note: the Web Application Firewall and […]

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.

Rant: F5 LTM and GTM Doesn’t Do External AAA Authorization

F5 BigIP LTM and GTM does not have any user author­isa­tion cap­ab­il­ity for admin­is­tra­tion by Radius or TACACS. Can you believe that?
They have been pro­du­cing F5 BigIP soft­ware for more than a dec­ade and I can­not believe that cus­tom­ers have not been ask­ing to provide external user author­isa­tion. To com­pare, I have just been con­fig­ur­ing APC Switched […]

Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) — Introduction and Comparison With F5

My new interest of the moment is the Cisco Application Control Engine or ACE mod­ule. I have just received a pair of them and plan­ning on start­ing the con­fig­ur­a­tion in the next couple of days. So per­haps some dis­cus­sion on the ACE is in order, and why I am con­sid­er­ing using both F5 LTM AND the Cisco ACE in this network.