Category Archives: networking

Hello China, part III.

We’ve been pushing production traffic out of our China colo for about a month now.  One of my concerns was how well this site would serve our global user base and how well the Netscaler’s dynamic GSLB would work.  I didn’t want users being sent to this data center who should really goto San Jose […]

China, Amsterdam, San Jose and global load balancing

Mozilla’s current GSLB (global server load balancing[1]) solution (Citrix Netscalers) is a mix of active proximity probes and static map assignments.
The algorithm first checks to see if there’s a match in the static maps and then falls back to proximity metrics. If that’s missing, it’ll round-robin through all the GSLB sites (effectively three - […]

ipv6… is this thing on?

During the past two Firefox releases (2.0.0.5 and 2.0.0.6) I’ve been running an dual-stake ipv4/ipv6 accessible download server. This box was serving Firefox updates and was part of releases.mozilla.org. I thought I could use traffic numbers to help justify a native ipv6 Internet connection.
Here’s what ipv4 traffic looked like during a one week period […]

IPSEC VPN between Cisco IOS & Netscreen - solved !

This isn’t necessarily Mozilla related but after spending a month on and off trying to get an IPSEC VPN up between a Cisco IOS router and a Juniper Netscreen SSG5 and finding very little help online, I figured I might as well document it here for others to find (myself, for instance, or, hey Google […]

Where in the world is AMO? (Part V: It’s live, again!)

With little fanfare, we flipped the switch last night and started serving addons.mozilla.org out of both Amsterdam and San Jose. Took two tries and a hardware swap, but we got it!
This whole saga’s been detailed elsewhere (and here and here and here).
The Good (and the graphs)
Last time, I rolled back when Europe started waking […]

Who needs IPv6 anyways?

The 6bone is dead. Long live IPv6.
(Don’t know what IPv6 is?)
I’m no stranger to v6 - I played with it years ago while at 3Com (hi Cindy!) and actually deployed it natively, along with an automatic 6to4 tunnel relay, at the last ISP I worked at. However, I think I was on the […]

How to build a better (SSL proxy) mouse trap (with lighttpd)?

We run our web farm behind a pair of Citrix Netscalers in both San Jose and Amsterdam. What really hits these boxes hard is the SSL offloaded traffic and in certain instances has caused the Netscalers to fall over on themselves.
Right now our setup looks like:

(Pardon the shapes, it’s what I have to work […]