Congratulations to the 2009 iRule. Do You? winners! Compared to previous years, it is worth noting that the competition for top-spots in both the Customer and Partner divisions was incredibly tight. In fact, the community voting – a first for this contest – actually played a role in determining the final outcome (as it should, given how great this community is). So, while we have to crown top winners, everyone of the finalists really delivered spectacular iRules that demonstrate creativity and flair.

And, the winners are…

Customer Winners
1st     Chetan Bhatt (USA) – "Pool Member Status List"
2nd    Kris Weinhold (USA) – "Siteminder Authentication Rule (Login External, NTLM Internal)"
3rd    Jari Leppala (Finland) – "RTSP-Redirect"

F5 Partner Winners
1st    Sake Blok / Ion-IP (Netherlands) – "EncryptOutgoingSOARequest"
2nd   Henrik Gyllkrans / Advanced IP Scandinavia AB (Sweden) – "Cookie Tampering Prevention"
3rd    Levin Chen / Sinogrid Information Technology (China) – "iRules_deny_repeat_login_ok"

They have all selected the prizes from our list of options and will be receiving their goodies shortly. (surprise, surprise – anything Apple was a hit with MacBooks and Cinema Displays the collective choices!)

We want to thank ALL of the participants; this edition was more difficult than ever to judge due to the volume and quality of entries. There were some additional iRules – we call them “Honorable Mention” finalists – that didn’t make the top 6 but deserve recognition. So, check them out as well.

We want to acknowledge and thank all of our celebrity judges from Dr. Dobb’s, Dell’Oro Group, and Enterprise Strategy Group as well. Jon, Alan, and Jon each invested time and energy reviewing entries, offering their comments, all freely and simply at our asking. F5 and our community are fortunate they appreciate the spirit of DevCentral and I encourage you to visit their sites, blogs, and learn more about what they do. They are ALL top-notch in their respective fields and you will likely benefit from paying attention to what they say.

Special recognition goes to our F5 “guest guru” judge Kirk Bauer and the DevCentral guys as well. Kirk’s dedication – to spend hours judging in the wee hours of the morning just to make sure his work was done before leaving later that day for a long holiday vacation – is remarkable and embodies the F5 culture. The DevCentral guys also contributed as usual. I see the team everyday and they put tremendous thought and energy into helping make your community something that makes your life better, easier, and hopefully fun too.

In the end, I find it incredibly inspiring and humbling each time we do these contests. What captures the spirit of the contributors, and community best for me, are the comments 2nd Place Partner Henrik Gyllkrans made when he learned he had been selected one of the best. His sentiments unquestionable represent the collective attitude that makes the DevCentral community truly special:

“I’m proud and honored that my iRule was received so well by the judges. I hope this iRule can help organizations around the world to deliver better and more secure sites.”

With that said, congratulations to the winners. Jump on over to the 2009 iRule. Do You? contest section to learn more and check out some cool iRules!

After reviewing the flood of entries (thank you ALL!) in 2009 contest, we’re ready for what I’ve been most excited about: your chance to select the winner of this year’s iRule. Do You? contest.

If you want to skip the extra blabbering from me, you click here and vote!

Otherwise, here are some more details about the contest.

As you’ve probably noticed, we’re running a bit behind our original schedule. It’s directly due to the many entries and due diligence from our judging team to spend the necessary time reviewing the entries thoughtfully.

Special thanks go out to our Expert Panel of Judges for making time for the judging process:

• Jon Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of Dr. Dobb’s (www.drdobbs.com)
• Alan Weckel, Director, Ethernet Switch and Enterprise Telephony Market Research of Dell’ Oro Group (www.delloro.com)
• Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (www.enterprisestrategygroup.com)

They are all industry leaders that do great work in their respective fields so take a few minutes to check out what they do.

Additionally, thanks to our F5 Guest Judge, iRule Guru, and all-around great guy and community contributor, Kirk Bauer. To get an idea of his iRule chops, just check out the incredibly popular (and recently updated!) Proxy Pass iRule.

The iRules we reviewed were fantastic. Here are just a few of the comments from our judges about some of the iRules they reviewed:

“Nice solution to a growing problem. Video servers demand lots of bandwidth and this takes the load off.”

“Great internal use for iRules, and since SMB is used in any Microsoft shop, there may be some extensibility for other users.”

“Great integration to web authentication. Could be extended to other technologies beyond Siteminder.”

“I like the fact that iRules solved this challenging problem, and I think it was a great idea to do so…”

“Very original concept for a challenging problem, and quite a simple iRule to accomplish so much. Much cleaner than the alternative. I like it!”

“I really like this solution: it is the Election Hash iRule for load balancing proxies but with RTSP and using redirects so traffic doesn't flow through the LTM. Interesting and novel use of an iRule and I think it would be applicable to other similar streaming media solutions.”

“I love iRules that manipulate binary traffic and this one is very compact and functional.”

“This iRule is unquestionably valuable.”

“Fixing bugs in browsers with BIG-IP iRule insertions. You don't get much more cool than that, do you?”

Without question, this has been the best iRule contest yet, with many entrants, close competition at the highest levels, the VERY best part: you get to vote to! So, select your favorite iRule. You have until 12pm on Monday, November 2, 2009 to choose yours. Then, well add your votes to the overall selection process and announce our winners shortly!

The 2009 DevCentral Community Survey wrapped up last Thursday and the volume of participation simply crushed all previous DevCentral surveys. With over 500 respondents from around the world, this survey provided some remarkable insight into who you are, what types of things you’d like to see in the future, as well as some things you NEVER want to see from F5. (note: I’m saving this for a future blog post of it’s own)

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some interesting stats with you about your community. Thanks to everyone for your great input, your candid comments, and your continued support. Without you, DevCentral simply wouldn’t exist as it does today. We take your feedback seriously. Look for some new features and programs to emerge over the next few months that will be a direct result of your ideas and requests.

But, enough with all of the fluffy community talk. I know what you really care about: who wins one of those 7 iPod Touches?

Without further delay, here are the lucky 7:

• claretian
• dlarsen
• Estradad
• rmcree
• chasecen
• mcharette
• glenmo

So, if you are one of these lucky folks, thanks for playing. Your iPod is on it’s way… Just be sure to subscribe to the Weekly Podcast and other videos on iTunes when you set it up.

Finally, thank you again to all of you who took time out of your busy day to help make DevCentral even better. Stay tuned – there are exciting things to come.

Note: survey winners were selected through the use of the www.random.org “True Random Number Generator”. We entered the total number of participants and generated 7 random numbers. For those of you that want to learn more about how they use atmospheric noise vs. pseudo-random algorithms as used in video games to create random numbers, please go here.

Back in 2001 (wow – seems like yesterday!), F5 introduced the first-ever, open/Web services API for network devices called iControl. With it, it sparked a major shift in the way companies could look at integrating network devices with applications. Leading software vendors figured it out. And, thousands of companies since then have used iControl to build custom monitoring apps, management solutions that more closely fit their internal processes, and even automate some cool stuff including enabling applications to tell the network how to deliver them.

While all fine and dandy (and fun to be a part of personally), the most important decision and event was the willingness to embrace SOAP/XML. By doing this (kudos to Joe Pruitt, BTW, for this call… it wasn’t without some feisty internal debate, truth be told), it opened up API access to our gear from virtually any SOAP stack or development tool and language a customer or partner wanted to use.

Why so cool, you ask? It’s simple – you know Perl? Great. Use it. You don’t need to learn SNMP. Has your organization trained everyone to use Java as a standard app language? No worries – go for it. Same for Ruby, Python, C#, and more. And, even new scripting approaches like PowerShell.

By choosing an open standard, it opens the doors for any customer or vendor to use whatever they want without having to swallow yet another vendor-mandated technology just to make something work.

So, this brings me to the payoff. We get this question often: “what are the supported dev tools/languages/toolkits/etc for iControl?”

Well, here you have it. This is both the “F5-supported” stuff plus what we know folks in the community have used successfully. We’ll turn this into a wiki doc too, so that if you have something you’ve used successfully, you can post it as well. In the meantime, add yours to the comments below.

Go forth and build your apps for iControl your way. (looking for some examples? You can find a ton of them here for free in the Codeshare.)

Perl:

Library: SOAP::Lite (www.soaplite.com)

IDE's: ActivePerl, Eclipse EPIC Perl, Open Perl IDE, and others.

C#/VB/.NET:

Library: iControl Assembly for .Net (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=68)

IDE's: Visual Studio 2003, VS 2005, VS 2008, VS 2010

PowerShell:

Library: iControl PowerShell Cmdlets (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=71)

IDE's: PowerShell Console Host, PowerShell ISE, PowerGUI, Sapien PrimalScript, PowerShell Analyzer, PowerShell Plus, and various others.

Java:

Library: iControl Library for Java (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=68), Apache SOAP, kSOAP

IDE's: Eclipse, Borland JBuilder, IBM Websphere, Oracle JDeveloper, BEA WebLogic Workshop, IntelliJ IDEA, Blackberry MDS, plus others...

Python:

Library: pyControl (devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=149), ZSI, SOAPpy, Suds

IDE's: Komodo, Eclipse PyDev, and others.

PHP:

Library: PHP SOAP (us3.php.net/soap)

IDE's: Eclipse PHP IDE, PHPEclipse, Komodo, Zen Studio, and others.

Ruby:

Library: iControl Assembly for .Net, SOAP4R

IDE's: IronRuby (.Net support), NetBeans, Idea, RadRails, and others.

If you haven’t heard about about the revolution underway,  you’re not paying attention. To get a running update of the cool new features in v.10, check out the fresh new v.10 spotlight page. Otherwise, read on.

Here at DevCentral, you can count on (at least) three things:

1.) Our team is comprised of full-on geeks who are constantly trying to stretch our technology and challenge each other at the same time.

2.) We do out best to call it the way it is and as we see it. You bet your career and company on us so you deserve nothing less than the straight truth.

3.) If it relates to iRules, iControl, or other advanced F5 technical topics, you’ll probably hear about it first on DevCentral.

Item #1 above puts us in a unique position where – sometimes – we break stuff. While we would love to say there are never bugs or issues with our products, that wouldn’t be true and you wouldn’t believe us anyway. So, our “policy” is that if we know about it and it can affect you, you deserve to know about it too. While we like surprises on our birthdays, we don’t like surprises when upgrading software or rolling out new features. We suspect you feel the same way.

So, with that said, here’s something you need to pay attention to as you migrate to v10. While performing internal testing on some advanced iRules on v10, we discovered a possible scenario that users should be aware of.  Making use of certain commands: (session, persist <add, lookup, delete>, after) inside one of a few specific constructs: (switch, foreach, eval, catch) can result in a race condition, causing serious repercussions to the performance and stability of your device.

The good news is that we've discovered this internally, zeroed in on the very specific nature of the issues, and our fantastic PD team is already working to correct them. Things will again function properly as of v10.0.1, slated to release in a few weeks. It is highly recommended that if you are running code making use of any of these command combinations that you either re-work your code to avoid them before upgrading to v10.0, or wait until v10.0.1 is released with the necessary fixes in place to avoid this issue.

To learn more about how to rework your existing iRules to avoid this issue, you should check out the document posted here in the iRule forum. If you have questions or feedback, please reach out and let us know how we can help.

While you’re thinking about that, you might want to click on over to “New in v.10” section of the iRule Wiki to familiarize yourself with the new functionality.

[update] Since Joe came in to my office and whined that iControl wasn’t getting enough props (in addition to iRules), here’s the link. Be sure to check it out. Word. [/update]

I had a fascinating conversation recently with an IT pro that I know and respect. We were talking about IT management, issue triage and resolution, and he made the point that the first question any IT pro asks is, “what changed?” Makes sense to me.

For many, change = risk. I understand that. Change even the littlest detail and there’s a reasonable likelihood that the fragile web of intricate IT interdependencies will come crashing down.

Often, the risk (or fear?) of change is justification for standing still – not upgrading or choosing a newer, better approach that provides orders of magnitude more functionality for the same or lower cost. I can see the reasoning, but in my opinion, that is incredibly short-sighted.

Here’s another way of looking at it: You are ALWAYS going to be dealing with change, no matter what kind of change it is, whether it is orchestrated by you or others. Change happens, whether it is proactive or passive, offensive or defensive.

It seems to me you have two choices:

• Accept the status quo. Continue burning precious time (yours and others) and budget troubleshooting changes that happen with the same old gear. Simply rehearse the response, “that’s how we’ve always done it…”.
• Embrace progress and change to something better or new to you. Ideally, your reward is a better way of resolving (and maybe ending!) the same old problems you were dealing with before. Worst case is that you at least get new and interesting troubleshooting challenges to take on, right?!

One is driven by fear. The other is motivated by progress, growth, and improvement beyond the status quo.

In sporting terms, one is referred to as “playing not to lose”. The other? “Playing to win.”

If you’re going to deal with the impact of changes one way or another, isn’t it worth it to at least take charge and make it interesting?

For those not able to tune in to our live launch event at DevCentral this week, here is a great video to watch. It features F5’s Dan Matte, Johnson Chen, and Fred Wu presenting at the local China launch event for DevCentral-China in Shanghai.

You can watch it at Network Chinabyte here!

Here is another article from China’s IT168 that includes some great pics.

Election Day 2008 represented many “firsts”. As more people document President Obama’s campaign team and their creative use of social media (Twitter, etc.), one aspect few have explored is the web infrastructure used to support the flurry of online activity. For MSNBC.com, Election Day 2008 represented the biggest day of traffic in it’s 12-year history with over 20 million unique viewers and 250 million page views. Wow.

When it comes to IT, it’s always fun to throw around big numbers. Well, these are indeed BIG numbers.

Here is a particularly interesting aspect that really speaks to the importance of actual site performance under heavy demand: this technology enabled MSNBC.com to increase viewer loyalty through improved website performance, resulting in 13.5 minutes spent per user on MSNBC.com compared to 10.5 minutes for CNN.com (Nielson Online).

Fascinating stuff. Big performance numbers for the IT team. Serious value for the business team.

Check out the just published case study (PDF) here on f5.com.

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If you get a moment, join in the celebration here! This is the culmination of a fantastic global effort to deliver our second region DevCentral section – DevCentral-China. And, for those of you online, you can join the live event underway in Shanghai now. Behind the scenes, there has been some exceptional work done to accelerate this solution (symmetric and asymmetric) using F5’s WebAccelerator. There will be much to see related to this effort over the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Without question, times are tough everywhere these days. I nor our team take any of these struggles (or the employees and customers they affect) lightly. The latest news? Networking vendor Nortel announced they were in trouble. It's amazing to see how the networking landscape has changed over the past 5 or 6 years. Some vendors seen as leaders not long ago have nearly disappeared. Back in the day, I'm sure some could argue why the Alteon gear was worth the investment. (at the time, I disagreed and still do. However, I'm biased towards F5, of course)

The uncertainty around financial viability cuts right to ongoing product support for and future development of some products currently deployed in mission critical locations. While we all stand by and watch established companies (candidly - some that looked rock solid) start to crumble, what's a network architect or saavy IT manager to do? 

Here's a pretty decent option:  F5 announced a buyback program for Nortel customers to hopefully put minds at ease. (get more specific details here)

Now, I'm not going to try to sugarcoat this one; F5 would like to become the preferred vendor in existing Nortel shops. But, I sincerely believe that when anyone looks at where BIG-IP is today, it becomes pretty obvious that it offers a ton of functionality those of you running Nortel should consider. There are plenty of resources out there for you to research starting here.

So, while this is tough news that affects many, there are options. Ultimately, this is a pretty sweet opportunity to take gear that is dated, get some value for it, and possibly unleash some powerful new iRule capabilities into your application delivery network that could make your life much easier.

One of my favorite - if not the most favorite - aspects of DevCentral is the remarkably global mix of the community. Any given month, we see visits originating from over 150 different countries around the globe (quiz: without using Google or a PC, can any of you actually recite 150 different countries from memory?! I didn't think so... <g>)

As I was looking over some of the registrations from just one recent 24-hr period, I started thinking it would be cool to lay them out on a map. Here's what a snapshot of a recent, random 24-hr period looked like. Note the color-coding of the markers and the key to which time period they represent. Times are Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8:00). (note: this is not meant to suggest this is the total percentage of distribution because I KNOW there are smart people doing exciting work in other places that didn't happen to appear during this 24-hr period... places like South Africa, China, Latin America, Germany, Finland, Russia, Taiwan, and more...)

While the normal "work day" as it follows the sun is evident (i.e. virtually all of the Australian and Asian registrations were in the 2pm-8pm timeframe), I was pretty surprised to see some night owls amongst the bunch. (OK - seriously? Not really. It IS cool to see folks out there burning the midnight oil and registering for DevCentral at midnight... 2am... or later in their respective timezones.)

At any rate, welcome new members! And, thanks all existing members for making this community so fantastic!

We're on... as a wrap up to our team meeting in Seattle this week, we're "celebrating" and enjoying a rare face-to-face podcast recording. Here are a couple pics for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to look for the podcast later today or tomorrow.

It's an exciting day. The entire DevCentral team is here in Seattle for a few days to transmute our individual ideas into something profound. In addition to sharing ideas, we're enjoying the time together and a few Top Pot doughnuts.

In addition to this being yet another of our regular strategy sessions, we'll be doing our weekly podcast face-to-face later this week as well which should be cool.

As we discuss more, we may post some questions out there for folks to weigh in on. This is your community and our role is to make it the best we can to help you be successful. So, stay tuned.

Listening to: Joe Pruitt - "DevCentral Architecture/Roadmap Whiteboard"

In you're in Vegas attending the DevConnections event at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, look for us at booth #625. I'll also be presenting at OpenForce08 this afternoon about the role network infrastructure plays in successfully delivering DNN-based applications.

There are many dynamic things happening every day on DevCentral. While innovative, powerful technology (IMO) helps,it all starts with incredible people. Customers. Industry partners. Resellers and Consultants. F5 staff. And, the DevCentral Team. The work that Joe, Don, and Colin have done and continue to do amazes me. Based upon how many people are reading the Blogs and Tech Tips, posting to the forums, and more, I'm guessing you agree. They've set the bar pretty high.

However, it's just been kicked up another notch with the addition of a new member to the DevCentral Core Team. It's a honor to welcome Jason Rahm, new F5 Solution Developer, to the team. Now, the name may be new to you but his reputation preceeds him. If you spent ANY time in the forums, you've run across him - alias "citizen_elah" - and his over 1,100 posts! Over the years, Jason has spent many an hour configuring, testing, reconfiguring, writing iRules, and more with F5 products. Along the way, he won DevCentral's 1st iRule Contest. He even published a document that has become a top-5 hit with the community - "Graphing Your LTM Environment with Cacti".

Wasting no time jumping in, he's published his first Tech Tip as a team member today that digs into the guts of BIG-IP and it's TCP profile. Check out "Investigating the LTM TCP Profile: Nagle's Algorithm".

While I'm amazed at what the DevCentral Core team has done so far, I have a feeling that Jason's contributions are going make things even more interesting. Welcome Jason!