Well, not quite, but almost...

A few weeks ago, Robert Scoble was here at F5 talking to us about our extensibility story with iControl and iRules. We had a great conversation but he left with one outstanding question:

Can you use iControl to build an RSS feed?

So, I took that as a challenge and started thinking about how we could transform the information we can pull off oa BIG-IP into a syndication feed. The answer was sort of obvious. How about aggregating network object status? Sounded good to me, so I set off an wrote one in perl.

There were a few issues I worked around, the biggest being object caching (so that your aggregator will only update when items have changed based on the timestamp).

Here is the usage:

http://server_address/path/NetworkStatus.cgi?args
args:
-----
host - BIG-IP address
port - connection port (default to 443)
user - BIG-IP username (read-only account or above).
pass - BIG-IP password 
type - [node|pool|vs|all(default)]

I'd highly recommend not passing username and password on the wire. I'd hardcode those values into the RSS feed. I only put the options in for testing. One could easily build a map inside the code that stored user credentials per hostname. That way you could hide the credentials and make the cgi more dynamic.

I've uploaded my first take at it to CodeShare. Take a look and let me know what you think...

-Joe