

Load Balancing with HAProxy - fideloper
http://serversforhackers.com/editions/2014/07/15/haproxy/

======
fideloper
This is the latest release of my serversforhackers.com newsletter. I'm hoping
for improvements / comments on configuration if you have any! (Otherwise,
hopefully you learn something useful :D )

~~~
chatmasta
Nice job! You've got a lot of quality, consistent writing going into this.

I assume you're trying to build a readership. Have you considered curating
links to supplement your writing? I recently subscribed to Pycoder's Weekly
[0] and really enjoy the curated content they sent out every week. They have a
big user base, too, and have been able to monetize it with job postings. It
seems like you're in a complementary niche and could probably apply many of
the same principles.

[0] [http://pycoders.com/](http://pycoders.com/)

~~~
fideloper
Yeah! I get pycoders, postgres, data science and devops weekly newsletters!

What I've found is that I skip over the long list of links, thinking I'll get
to them later. However, I never do! I wanted to make this one have fewer
topics, but get more in depth with them.

~~~
chatmasta
I think one problem you might face is that when people subscribe to weekly
newsletters, they are usually looking for bite sized content. This long form
writing is great, and very informative. However, tutorials are more suited to
"pulling" readers to the content, rather than "pushing" the content to
readers.

If you are deploying HAProxy, you'll google for tutorials about installing it.
But is you're not deploying HAProxy, why would you read a long email about it?
In the case of receiving an email at random time on a Monday, wouldn't you
prefer it contain a list of links for you to skim, and if you so choose, a
longer article on the intricacies of setting up long form content?

Look at it this way: 100% of weeks, I'm interested in receiving links. It's a
much lower percentage of weeks that I'm interested in reading a long form
tutorial. Of course, during those weeks, it's great to have. But I think you
risk losing a lot of interested readers by focusing _only_ on long form
content.

My advice: stick to the tutorials as a feature of each week's email (but no
big deal if you miss one!), and fall back on a set of 5-10 interesting links.
This way you will retain more readers and also reduce the pressure on yourself
to write a long article every week.

~~~
fideloper
The content is on the site rather than the email. The email is really just a
form of communication about the article, except I publish articles every 2
weeks along with the newsletter.

------
thu
I could have used part of that yesterday!

Suggestions:

As I have installed HAProxy in a Docker container, I noticed that the
dependencies for `sudo add-apt-repository` are quite numerous. Instead I
created a new sources.list and added the signing key manually.

Since you use SSL, a nice addition to your configuration is to redirect non-
ssl trafic:

    
    
        redirect scheme https code 301 if !{ ssl_fc }
    

Examples on the web leave out the `code 301` (the default is 302).

Finally I had to try a few different ways to get my certificate and key to
work with HAProxy. The order in my case was certificate, private key,
intermediate, root ca (concatenated in a single file).

~~~
fideloper
Thank you!

------
meanjollies
How is HAProxy's IPv6 support in an IPv6-only stack? I've been using OpenBSD
in conjunction with CARP and relayd because IPv6 load balancing under Linux
was lacking when I was evaluating options some years ago. I can find that it
features IPv6 support, but not much more than that other than use cases for
IPv6-to-IPv4 translation, which I'm not interested in.

