Development and General
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...
I recently received an internal iRule email and one of our folks created a search provider for FireFox to search DevCentral. Lori quickly responded and asked if we could get this posted to DevCentral. Why not if it will help the community so I took a look. Then it occurred to me that a while back I created a search provider definition based on the OpenSearch specification. For some reason, on our last site refresh, the links in our website were removed so the browser didn’t natively pick them up. I fixed that so now you can add DevCentral as...
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...
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...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. md5 The Unix “md5” command (aliased to “openssl dgst –md5” or “md5sum”) calculates and verifies 128-bit MD5 hashes as described in RFC 1321. The MD5 hash (or checksum) functions as a compact digital fingerprint of a file. It is extremely unlikely that any two non-identical files existing in the...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. touch The Unix “touch” command is used to change a file’s access and modification timestamps. It can also be used to create a new empty file. The options to the Unix touch command are implemented with the following PowerShell parameters: ...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. cut The Unix “cut” command is used to extract sections from each link of input. Extraction of line segments can be done by bytes, characters, or fields separated by a delimiter. A range must be provided in each case which consists of one of N, N-M, N- (N to...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. cat The Unix “cat” command is used to concatenate and display files. Given a file or filename list, it will print the contents of that file to standard output. There are several options in the Unix command that are implemented with the following PowerShell arguments: ...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. dirname The Unix “dirname” command will strip any non-directory suffix from a file name. Given a NAME, dirname will print the name with it’s trailing “/” component removed. If NAME contains no “/” characters, it will output “.” (meaning the current directory). Since PowerShell is run on windows,...
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