ISV Solutions

Google Takes Away Your Last Place Of Solitude - Gaming

Joe Pruitt — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:22:18 GMT

Google takes aim at your last place of ad-free solitute - Gaming.

Ads, you know what they are. You are surrounded by them day in and day out. Whether you are watching TV/movies, browsing a website, reading email, or reading your favorite blog, they are there to greet you. In the past, we've always had at least one place we could go to escape the assault of ads on our life - gaming. Well, you better enjoy it while it lasts because Google aims to take that refuge away from you with it's Google In-Game Advertising initiative.

Whether you are a marketer wanting to extend the reach of your video ads, drive your brand, or reach the new generation of social gamers Google has you covered with it's AdWords In-Game ad campaigns.

Or, if you are a publisher that would like to join a network tailored for web-based games, access campaigns from the world's top brands, fill up 100% of you remnant inventory, and filter out unwanted ads, then they have you covered as well with AdSense for Games.

So, next time you login to FaceBook to kick back with a few rounds of Scramble or Pathwords, be on the watch out for some embedded ads for your viewing pleasure. Google knew how much you were missing out on them during your game play and they aim help you out in the very near future!

Enjoy the ads folks!

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, Google, AdSense, AdWords, Games, Joe Pruitt

Protect Yourself From ClickJacking With FireFox And NoScript

Joe Pruitt — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:34:27 GMT

Worried about losing your personal information? Yep, me too! The updated FireFox plugin NoScript aims to thwart the recently discovered ClickJacking class of browser based security exploits.

Less than a month ago a new class of browser based security exploits were discovered that allows an attacker to get you to click on a button without your knowledge thus executing malicious code or inadvertently exposing personal information.

Robert Hansen of SecTheory LLC and Jeremiah Grossman of WhiteHat Security Inc coined the term "ClickJacking". From Jeremiah Grossman:

Think of any button on any Web site, internal or external, that you can get to appear between the browser walls. Wire transfers on banks, Digg buttons, CPC advertising banners, Netflix queue, etc. The list is virtually endless and these are relatively harmless examples. Next, consider that an attack can invisibly hover these buttons below the users' mouse, so that when they click on something they visually see, they actually are clicking on something the attacker wants them to.

The recommended protection at this point is to use FireFox with the NoScript plugin that enables frame/plug-in blocking.

But, the latest version of NoScript goes one step further with a new feature called "ClearClick" specifically aimed at protecting users against ClickJacking attacks.

Rather than relying on frame/plug-in blocking, which were already available, I decided to move on and add a brand new feature, developed from scratch, for people who couldn't bear blocking frames outright, said Italian developer and security researcher Giorgio Maone in an interview on Computerworld.com.

In his blog, Maone spelled out what ClearClick does in greater detail:

Whenever you click or otherwise interact, through your mouse or your keyboard, with an embedded element which is partially obstructed, transparent or otherwise disguised, NoScript prevents the interaction from completing and reveals to you the real thing in 'clear'. At that point, users can decide for themselves whether to continue clicking, or free up the mouse from underlying, and potentially exploitive, content.

So, don't wait, hop on over to the Mozilla AddIns site and protect yourself with NoScript.

As a side note, we had a great podcast a while ago with Jeremiah Grossman that you might want to check out!

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, ClickJacking, NoScript, FireFox, Robert Hansen, Jeremiah Grossman, Joe Pruitt

Gain visibility Into Your BIG-IP delivered Web Applications With Symphoniq

Joe Pruitt — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:21:43 GMT

Webinar Details

Date: Thursday Oct 16th, 2008
Time: 9AM PST, 12PM EST
Duration: 45 minutes

Featured Speakers:

Peter Murray
Technical Marketing Manager
F5 Networks

Hon Wong
CEO
Symphoniq

IT departments purchase F5’s BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to increase their Web Application performance. Because of the complexity of the applications being accelerated, finding an optimal ADC configuration requires visibility into the impact the appliance has on both the end user and the network.

Symphoniq has created a Web Application performance monitoring solution based on our TRUE (The Real User Experience) technology. An industry first, the solution integrates tightly with F5’s powerful iRules and iControl platform to provide an out of the box ADC and real user monitoring solution for all of your BIG-IP HTTP applications.

Register now for this webinar, and hear Peter and Hon discuss how F5 and Symphoniq can help you gain visibility into your ADC infrastructure, and improve your end users’ Web Application experience.

In this webinar you will discover:

How F5 acceleration technology can help address performance issues associated with complex Web architectures.
How collecting ADC and end user browser metrics provides the data required to optimize application delivery.
How using your existing ADC hardware can give you a cost effective platform for monitoring HTTP applications.

I've worked with Hon and the gang over at Symphoniq with the iControl integration for a while now and they've got some great technologies that you really should take a look at if you are in the world of web applications and would like to get a closer look at how the applications are performing and how you can optimize them. Believe me, it'll be the best way you can spend your 45 minutes next Thursday morning. So, on the 16th, grab yourself a cup of coffee and join in, you won't regret it.

For more information, check out www.f5.com and www.symphoniq.com.

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, BIG-IP, Symphonq, TRUE, ADC, Joe Pruitt

Try To Stop The Fire From The Latest Release of Mono 2.0!

Joe Pruitt — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:32:15 GMT

Developers rejoice! Today The Mono Project has released Mono 2.0 out into the wild which will enable you to build that dream application cross platform with the latest and greatest features in Microsoft's .NET runtime library.

Sponsored by Novell, the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications says the projects website.

The latest grand release of Mono v2.0 includes the following new Microsoft compatible features:

ADO.NET 2.0 API for access to databases.
ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing web-based applications.
Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
System.XML 2.0 API for manipulating XML documents.
System.Core support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
System.Xml.Linq support for a LINQ provider for XML.
System.Drawing 2.0 API for portable graphics rendering.

In addition to the .NET compatibility, the following Mono specific and third party APIs have been included as well:

Gtk 2.12 binding and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows, and MacOS X.
Mono.Cecil for manipulating ECMA CLI files.
Mono.Cairo binding to the Cairo graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms.
Mono's SQLite support for creating/consuming databases created with SQLite.
Mono.Posix library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application.
Extensive support for PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, SQLite, and Firebird.
C5 Generics Library for integrating generics into your application.
C# 3.0 compiler implementation with full support for LINQ.
Visual Basic 8 compiler.
IL assembler and disassembler and the development toolchain required to create libraries and applications.
Tools including a debugger, code inspection tools, linker, tuner and documentation tools.

Congrats Mono team for another great release!

I've been away from the Mono world for a while but I think it's definitely time to jump back in and get my hands a little dirty porting some iControl apps to Linux.

With all the coding I see on my plate, I may have to invest in a fire extinguisher to put out the flames from my burning keyboard.

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, Mono, .NET, Microsoft, LINQ, Product Review, Joe Pruitt

Google Chrome doesn't want you to visit google.com securely!

Joe Pruitt — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:49:52 GMT

I was playing around with Google Chrome the last few days and of course the first thing I did was login to my personal email account on Google Apps. Everything seemed to work great so I went ahead and visited a few other sites. Somewhere along the way I received an error page and clicked through it not thinking anything of it.

Yesterday on the DevCentral Podcast, Colin was talking about his recent tech tip on "Can iRules fix my cert mismatch errors?" and that reminded me of that error message. So I went back and checked it out and sure enough, it was a mismatch error. The image on the right is the security warning in Chrome and below is the same warning from FireFox 3. So I guess FireFox doesn't want you to visit google.com securely either? In fact, neither does Microsoft!

Want to try it out for yourself? Load up your browser and type in https://google.com. Not "www.google.com" but just "google.com" and make sure you put in "https" instead of "http".

As Google's own Chrome browser states:

You attempted to reach google.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as www.google.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of google.com. You should not proceed.

Google's own product is telling us that you should not proceed to google.com! What??? What the heck is going on? Is this a security issue? Has someone taken over Google's servers? Is this a fake version of Google that some hacker is trying to get me to visit? In this case, of course not, but it is an issue with the way they have configured their SSL certificates. I guess Google is assuming that their users will always type in "www." before "google.com" and didn't worry about testing the secure version of their site without the "www" prefix. Shame on you Mr. Network Guy in Google's Network group!

So what's going on? When you purchase a SSL certificate, the domain name of your site is included in the certificate along with other information such as your Organization name and other information that identifies the website that your certificate is securing. The information in Google's certificate is to the right. You'll see that the "Common Name (CN)" in this certificate is www.google.com. Google obviously has the same certificate protecting both www.google.com and plain old google.com. When you browse to the later, the browser sees that the Common Name in the certificate doesn't match the domain you are requesting. Security is important so an exact match is performed and if it's not the same, you get this standard security warning.

Looks like Google needs to pony up and spend the couple hundred bucks to buy a second certificate for those of us out here that like to save the wear-and-tear of our "w" keys.

Tsk, tsk, tsk... Rookie mistake Google!

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, Google, SSL, Certificates, Security, Chrome, Google Chrome, FireFox, Joe Pruitt

Symphonic releases TrueView ADC Edition

Joe Pruitt — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:13:21 GMT

I found out about this at our partner conference earlier this week and it looks like Symphonic's TrueView ADC Edition has made it's way out into the wild.

From the press sheet:

Symphoniq, in conjunction with F5, has created a unique monitoring solution to leverage your existing Application Deliver Controller (ADC) infrastructure to give you detailed, actionable insight into how the infrastructure is running, from your end user's perspective.
TrueView, ADC Edition takes advantage of Symphoniq's TrueView technology to measure real end-user response times, and leverages F5's iRules and iControl technologies to seamlessly integrate with your infrastructure to provide the information you need to optimize your web application delivery.

With all the benefits of the True Product line, TrueView ADC Edition is built exclusively around F5's BIG-IP. They are using iControl to enable Symphonic transaction monitoring and, in doing so, the BIG-IP is automatically configured to dynamically instrument outgoing web pages or SOA calls.

Key highlights in the TrueView ADC Edition include:

Monitors application performance as experienced by the real users of HTML, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight applications
Collects detailed Web performance parameters (such as response time, parsing time, time to first byte, and error rate) from the real user's perspective at the browser
Allows setting of thresholds to generate alerts on Web performance parameters to support 24/7 operations
Capture and report on F5 BIG-IP device statistics
Correlates F5 BIG-IP device statistics with critical web application parameters to gain unprecedented visibility
Business group oriented approach relates performance issues to business impact
Customizable SQL-based reporting engine supports service level reporting and historical data archival
Monitoring functionality leverages existing F5 BIG-IP appliances using iRules and iControl, no additional third-party appliance required
Seamless migration to the full TrueView suite for end-to-end application performance monitoring and diagnostics

If you are a BIG-IP customer and are looking at ways to eek the most out of your applications and their performance on the network, I'd highly suggest you take a look at Symphonic's new offering.

Who knows, maybe we'll get them on a podcast sometime soon to talk about how they've used iControl and iRules to their, and your, advantage.

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5, Symphonic, TrueView, ADC, iControl, iRules, Joe Pruitt

Scaling Ruby on Rails to 1 Billion Page Views a Month

Joe Pruitt — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:41:57 GMT

A while ago I blogged about how F5 was making mongrels better with a Side of Mayo. I referenced a blog post on Joyent's wonderful Joyeur blog on why Joyent uses F5's BIG-IP for their customers. Well, those krazy kids at Joyent are at it again...

In a recent post, Joyent point out how LinkedIn, a customer of theirs, built a Facebook application called BumperSticker using Ruby On Rails. LinkedIn made use of Joyent's Accelerators and our very own BIG-IP to scale Ruby on Rails to some very significant numbers.

13.5 million installations
1.5 million daily active users
20-27 million canvas page views a day

All this is served by

13 web application servers running nginx and mongrel.
8 static asset servers serving over 3,500,000 stickers, soon to migrate to a CDN.
4 MySQL servers in a master/slave configuration using Rick Olson's excellent masochism plugin.

For those video inclined, Joyent has an added bonus: check out the video they put together on the subject.

So, as the Twitter's out there continue to have availability issues and the debate continues as to the scalability of Ruby on Rails, BIG-IP helps show that with a good design and infrastructure planning, big things are possible. Keep up the good work Joyent! Oh, and if you ever want to do a guest spot on the DevCentral Podcast, please let us know. Oh, and if you ever need a guest for your Quad Core podcast, let me know - I'd be glad to sit in!

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, Joyent, Joyeur, LinkedIn, Ruby on Rails, Joe Pruitt

The Networking ABC's - R is for RTSP

Joe Pruitt — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:21:32 GMT

Today's letter in the Networking ABC's is the letter "R". I could have went with redundancy, RADIUS, rate class, router, or round robin, but I opted for a term that has to do with optimizing media transmission across the network and that's really important for us here at DevCentral as we are all about media! The word for today is RTSP or Real Time Streaming Protocol

"R" is for RTSP

RTSP

Pronounced: Ahr-Tee-Es-Pee

RTSP, not to be confused with RSTP or SCTP, stands for Real Time Streaming Protocol. RTSP, developed by the IETF and defined in RFC 2326, is a protocol for use in streaming media systems which allows a client to remotely control a streaming media server, issuing VCR-like commands like "Play" and "Pause" as well as allowing time based access to files on a server. Unlike the HTTP protocol, RTSP is a stateful protocol. A session ID is used to keep track of sessions when needed reducing the need for a permanent TCP connection. RTSP commands include DESCRIBE, SETUP, PLAY, PAUSE, RECORD, and TEARDOWN. RTSP is supported in many popular streaming media servers including Apple's Quicktime Streaming Server, as well as Microsoft's Windows Media Services.

Technorati Tags: F5, DevCentral, Networking ABCs, ABCs, RTSP, Joe Pruitt

iControl SDK v9.6.0 is here

Joe Pruitt — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:52:33 GMT

It's been a while since the last version of the SDK has been released and it looks like it's that time again.

So, whip out your zip program, and head on over to the iControl downloads page and be the first one on your block to get your hands on the latest and greatest iControl SDK.

Version 9.6.0 is a roll up of all previous upgrades and supports all previous versions of BIG-IP. What goodies can you expect to find in the SDK? Well, for starters, ASM and WA have made their debuts. LTConfig is the place to go for our new single configuration initiative. Oh, and for those of you lucky enough to have had your own "unboxing of Viprion", you can now automate configuring your clusters.

Oh, one more thing. The iControl Assembly has been updated for 9.6.0 as well, so for those of you java or Microsoft developers out there, make sure you grab the latest version for inclusion in your projects.

Happy coding!

-Joe

Technorati Tags: iControl, SDK, Assembly, ASM, WA, Viprion, cluster, java, .Net, Web Services, SOAP

F5 folks in the wild

Joe Pruitt — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:34:06 GMT

In the last few weeks there have been a few interviews with F5 folks that I thought you might be interested in.

In case you don't frequent the Redmond Channel Partner Online website, Columnist Lee Pender posted a write-up of a phone interview he had with F5's VP of the North America Partner Organization, Steve Hale. F5 was lucky enough to snap Steve up from a 17 year tenure at Microsoft and he's now working on guidance for our Partners, of which there are about 300 now, to enable them to be prepared to provide services around application delivery, networking and infrastructure, and storage virtualization. Read more about it here.

Another F5'er has been active this last week as well. Chris Lynch, F5's Senior VP of Data Solutions that F5 was again lucky enough to snag up as part of our acquisition of Acopia Networks. Chris is a very sharp guy and in this eWeek IT Link podcast, hosted by Mike Vizard, Chris talks about the need for a redesign in current enterprise infrastructure and data architectures to enable the next generation virtualized data center.

BTW, Steve and Chris, anytime you all want to talk about Partners or data center virtualization, know that you are always welcome guests on the DevCentral Weekly Podcast!

Technorati Tags: F5,Redmond Channel Partner,Steve Hale,Chris Lynch,eWeek,IT Link,DevCentral,Partners,Data Center Virtualization