Zxtm

I’ve been given permission to release Daily Kos’ Chef cookbook for installing the Zeus Traffic Manager. It’s located at https://github.com/dailykos/zeus-zxtm on github, and I’ll be adding it to the community repository at Opscode soon. What it does: Installs Zeus Traffic Manager and does the basic configuration. There are some attributes to set in the cookbook for it to run properly, like the version, location of the Zeus installation tarball, etc.

Zeus Traffic Manager (now, Stingray Traffic Manager) is an excellent product that I’ve found to be very useful, but the default “Service Unavailable” page is kind of ugly. Unfortunately, the documentation on how to put a more attractive error page up on your Zeus load balancer isn’t very clear, and I banged my head against it for a long time before I finally figured it out. It’s totally one of those “hiding in plain sight” things.