- A Software Architect's take on Network Security
F5
Fixes have been piling and I finally got my act together and released the latest version of the iRule Editor with support for BIG-IP version 11.0. Here are a few things that are mentioned in the Updated to the v11.0.0.1 iControl.dll While this won’t be something you really “see” as a UI enhancement, it was needed as a basis for some of the upcoming features in the next release. Be on the lookout for folders and session management in the near future. Support for v10+ format name/value pair data groups. ...
For the last few months I’ve been negligent on my regular blogging. I can come up with a bunch of excuses but it all boils down to feeling that I’ve got something meaningful to say. I’m not the type to just blog for the sake of blogging but I’ve begun to miss the great feedback I receive when I put something out there that helps folks. What has worked for me in the past is to come up with the concept of an ABC’s series where I put sequential posts out with each post having a topic based...
So, a few weeks ago, Lori asked me if I’d be up for writing a plugin for Windows Live Writer to insert DevCentral related links into her blog posts. For those that don’t know about Windows Live Writer and post to a blog regularly, you are doing yourselves a disservice by not checking it out (that is, if you are a Windows user). I’ve messed around with some Live Writer plugins in the past and figured this wouldn’t be too big a task. In fact, Microsoft has made it brain-dead simple to build a plugin and hook into...
For those who of you that are having problems with logging client addresses in their server logs because you are running your web servers behind a proxy of some sort, never fear, your solution is here. For those that don't, I already discussed in my previous posts about what the X-Forwarded-For header is so feel free to click back into those to read about it. History Back in September, 2005 I wrote and posted a 32-bit ISAPI filter that extracted the X-Forwarded-For header value and replaced the c-ip value (client ip) that is stored in the...
Those who know me, can attest that I'm a early adopter when it comes to social networking systems. The latest one I've been getting into lately is FourSquare.com. FourSquare.com describes itself as 50% friend finder, 30% social city guide, and 20% nightlife game. They include ways to keep up with what your friends are doing as well as offering up some fun challenges to have you explore cities in different ways. Once I've played around with a social networking site for a bit, my next step is to see what kind of API's they have exposed...
The folks here on the DevCentral team have been producing a weekly podcast for a while now. Trying to keep our budget low, we opted to copy what some other podcasters were doing by making use of Skype for our audio communication and found a great little Skype add-on called Pamela which creates high-quality WAV files from Skype conversations. We created a dedicated Skype account on an old machine here in the office that will auto-record whenever that account is added to a conversation. We would occasionally have differences in audio levels between the callers so we...
For those of you who don't know what Delicious.com is (yes it's the same as del.icio.us), I'll just borrow their overview from their getting started page: Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage, and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. Here on DevCentral, when new content is added, we regularly add it to various social networking sites, including Delicious. There are some great browser...
This week marks a major milestone for us here at DevCentral: we have reached our 100th weekly Podcast! To celebrate, we are going to try some new formats and the first one of these is user interaction! Starting today, we will be streaming our podcasts live on UStream.tv so you can listen in while we are recording. Don't worry, we will still be archiving the audio versions on DevCentral, iTunes, etc. UStream.tv gives us a few benefits. First, we can broadcast video along with the audio. At this point we are unable to syndicate everyone's webcam from our team...
Ok, so Pete did his best Weird Al impersonation the other day by throwing up his take-off on Men Without Hat’s “Safety Dance”. His version “Encryption Dance” is brilliant and we decided to highlight it in this weeks podcast with a challenge out to Pete to give us a live recording of his parody. Well, it didn’t take Pete long to answer to our call and he sent along his recording of “Encryption Dance”. For those who aren’t familiar with Men Without Hats, here’s their Safety Dance Video for you to check out first. And here’s...
For those that don't know what X-Forwarded-For is, then you might as well close your browser because this post likely will mean nothing to you… A Little Background Now, if you are still reading this, then you likely are having issues with determining the origin client connections to your web servers. When web requests are passed through proxies, load balancers, application delivery controllers, etc, the client no longer has a direct connection with the destination server and all traffic looks like it's coming from the last server in the chain. In the following diagram, Proxy2 is the last...
Come one, come all to our third edition of the iRule. Do You? Contest. For those that don't know, an iRule is F5's embedded packet scripting language allowing you to gain full control over how your applications flow across the network. There are hundreds of iRules in our iRule CodeShare and thousands of them running out in the wild. It's time for you iRule geeks out there to show us, and our community, your stuff. Whether you are an avid developer or just someone who wants to dabble in new technologies, this contest is for you. The rules...
Shrinking your Url’s is all the rage nowadays. If you are on Twitter, then odds are you have used one. Despite CodingHorror’s distaste for them in his recent blog post on Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web since 2002, they are a fact of life when we live in a world of 140 character status updates. So what’s a URL shrinking service anyway? Well, to put it simply, you supply them with a URL, they then supply you with a shorter URL containing a lookup “key”. When future requests are made to this shorter URL, connections are routed to that...
Twitter, for those who don’t know about it, is a status updating service that is all the rage nowadays. It’s popularity is primarily due to it’s simplistic nature. You post a 140 character status (known as a “tweet”) about what you are doing. You can also friend other folks to see what they are doing. If you are still lost, read up on the entry in Wikipedia and you should get the gist of it. The downside to this minimalistic approach is that it does not allow for rich multimedia content such as images or videos to be...
Last week I posted a PowerShell function library for Microsoft’s newly introduced search engine at Bing.com. The function library was appropriately named PoshBing. There was a log of interest in the script so I quickly moved it off my blog and onto a CodePlex project under PoshBing. Working on the command line is fun and all, but since I spend a good portion of my time accessing my twitter account, I figured it would be a bit of fun to integrate it with my previously released PoshTweet PowerShell twitter library. So, after an hour or so of coding...
Microsoft released their new search engine called “Bing” at, aptly named, http://www.bing.com. Microsoft is getting positive reviews from the likes of CNET, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch. Instead of posting my review of the site, I’ll let you browse the above links to find out what the services is all about. What interested me about Bing is that Microsoft has released a full API to allow you to use their services in your applications. The Bing API is documented at Microsoft’s developer site and I thought to myself how I could test it out. The obvious answer...
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