iControl

It's always great fun until the makeup comes off.

Don MacVittie — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:56:26 GMT

So we were discussing relationships today, and I got to thinking of the parallels between relationships and vendor relations. Lots has been written on the topic, but I'm never shy about throwing my two bits out.

It's interesting to me that when a person sets their sites on you they are often putting on a mask - the first six or eight or twelve weeks of a romantic relationship are sometimes different than reality. People are on their best behavior at the start of a relationship, and you see the world through somewhat tinted glasses - most of us rose-colored, but no doubt some of you are analytical enough that I'll just say tinted. You trip along merrily thinking the world is a very cool place and wishing you could spend all of your free time with this person.

For some of us lucky ducklings, that feeling continues on unabated. I'm one of those. Thirteen years in and I still think Lori's the perfect woman for me. She's not the perfect woman for you though, she's married. ;-) For most relationships, once the make-up comes off and you have to deal with this person on a daily basis - without the shield of perception but in the harsh light of reality, you find faults. For most relationships those faults are condemning. That's why most of us date a lot more people than we marry.

The same is true of IT purchases. The problem is that it's far easier to lose a girlfriend/boyfriend that turns out to be difficult than it is to lose a technology that isn't all that you expected. And the same type of hype goes on during the sales cycle as goes on during the courting cycle. It is the sales representative's job to sell you products, not to point out the weaknesses in those products. And third-party accreditation has become a market unto itself, so while some test labs and analysts go out of their way to be truthful, for most taking their word is like asking your new girlfriend's best friend if she's a worthy person. Of course the answer is yes, they're invested in each other.

So the conversations are somewhat parallel...

You: I like stock car racing.

Her (in an evening gown): Me too!

Is functionally equivalent to

You: We have this business problem.

Sales rep: Our product is designed form the ground up to solve that problem!

Is it all sales reps? No, there are a fair number out there that are trying to help you solve your problems and believe that their products will do just that. Of course, they wouldn't be very good sales reps if they didn't believe that, so the question of applicability to your problems is still valid.

The reason that relationships end up with you finding faults is simple, this person wasn't hand-made for you, they grew up in a different environment with different inputs and experiences. That makes for great variety but also causes a lot of seemingly promising relationships to bottom out quickly.

Have no doubt, the same is true of your IT purchases. That product wasn't made for you, you're going to find things that you wish were better. After all, a database or an Application Delivery Controller are not going to solve your business problem, only give you the tools to solve it yourself. You have to work at it, much as you do at a real-life after-the-makeup relationship. So be aware of that, lots of things sound great in the sales pitch that don't pan out long-term, or that the work required to get there is too much.

The best you can do is some research to try and ferret out the weaknesses others have encountered - see what others who have dated your vendor think after the makeup came off. After all, there is no eHarmony for vendors.

The other thing you can do is ask some questions about how to work around unknown weaknesses. Ask about adaptability and programmatic interfaces - see if you can make your long-term relationship with this vendor into what you want with a bit of extra work. iRules, profiles, and iControl are part of our answer to the "we can't be your perfect life-partner out of the box" market reality of ADCs, which means you can make us into your perfect mate. Other vendors in every space should be doing the same - just ask them, because should be is not the same as are.

If you don't ask those questions, you may find yourself sitting in your datacenter late at night, trying to resolve your issues and listening to the blues.

And that's a great question for your next date too - "Are you adaptable to become whatever I want, whenever I want, even if it changes over time?"

/Just sayin'

Don.

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Your site, your input.

Don MacVittie — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:43:17 GMT

I've said this before, even asked this less formally before, but we've got 3x the users we did just around a year ago, so it bears asking again.

As you no doubt could guess, we spend quite a bit of time talking about what kind of content we provide to you and what will provide you with the best information in a timely manner.

Our dilemma is of course that there are 30,000 of you and four of us (five if you count our fearless leader, a few more if you count the extended team), and while some of you provide excellent content that helps us out a lot, we still have to focus our time on what will help the most of you or items that will tell you about things you may not have been considering. It's a struggle that we engage in pretty regularly, trying to balance our coverage.

The thing is, we can make these determinations in a vacuum - we know why you're here - but prefer to get your input so that our coverage is focused on what you feel is important. We've got a six month calendar to guide our coverage, but want your help making that calendar even more useful.

With that in mind, I'm dropping you a poll to see what you think.

Check as many as you like, let us know what you want/need. We're here to help you do your job, so don't hesitate to clue us in on how we can do that better!

Don.

/Reading: US Tank Destroyers in WWII

What topics would you like to see more coverage of? ( polls)

Making Use of kSOAP2 at Dr. Dobbs

Don MacVittie — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:03:36 GMT

Hey all, shameless bit of self-aggrandizement here...

I can't find the shameless self-aggrandizement tag in our tags list though, so I'll mark it as development. ;-)

Dr. Dobbs Journal has run my article on programming in kSOAP2. This article has more info and compliments the Tech Tip here on DevCentral entitled The Minimum Steps to use KSOAP. If you're a mobile device developer, these two articles will help you get a jump start on using kSOAP to SOAP-enable your applications.

Yeah, I'm a little bit pumped. Even when I worked for CMP - the company that owns Dr. Dobbs - I couldn't get first publication there, though they did re-print a couple of my Network Computing articles. So this is a first for me, in a publication I 'grew up' with.

The progenitor of both of these articles was the Blackberry iControl Application lab that lets you monitor your BIG-IP from just about anywhere. Check it out if you haven't yet.

Don.

iRules with iControl - Two Great Tastes...

Don MacVittie — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:32:28 GMT

Well, I wanted to work some more on my iRules-fu, and I wanted to contribute to the community, so I took a break from the iC2I series this week to develop a simple iRules redirection generator.

If you're like me, you're primarily a developer and iRules are not something you specialize in. I don't mind using iRules to achieve tasks, but those tasks are generally to support my app dev efforts. That's what the iRule Redirection Generator is for. Taking the three most popular redirections and making a simple interface to have them generated for you.

There's nothing crazy difficult about the program (which is available as a C# project), it's mostly just a learning tool to help you understand how to write redirections in iRules. There's a tiny bit of iControl (two calls to get a pool list) in the source, but the point really was about making it easier to do iRules - because I'm lazy. This sample should provide a framework by which other iRules simplifications can be designed. Indeed, the application is written as a tabbed control so that we (that includes you!) can plug in more tool bits as time goes on.

So drop by the DevCentral Labs and check out the iRule Redirection Generator. There's a Tech Tip about it, but thanks to an excellent suggestion by Jeff, the Tech Tip is actually included in the "Usage" tab of the application in its entirety.

Don.

/Reading: D&D 4.0 Core rulebooks, picked them up at midnight last night.

/imbibing: Water and RedBull - did I mention I was out and about at midnight last night?

Great simple iControl graphic.

Don MacVittie — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:09:08 GMT

We like to call out when people are talking about how they're using our technologies out there on the Intertubes, and today my attention was drawn to this blog on TechRepublic.

While of course we're thrilled with the commentary, the diagram that he uses shows (for those uninitiated) a good overview of the iControl API. While it's similar to one we use when presenting, his is out there on the web for your viewing pleasure.

I don't know Rick (Joe has reached out to him, but I don't think any of us have talked to him), but we're obviously in agreement with him. Hopefully Joe can get him in for participation in a future podcast.

Don.

/imbibing: Water and coffee

/reading: Tech Blogs at the moment.

Web 2.0? Or Web 2.0?

Don MacVittie — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:52:57 GMT

As you've no doubt noticed, there is a bit of duplicate name confusion in the Web 2.0 world. Developers say "Web 2.0" and they mean SOA, dynamic binding, etc. When business people say "Web 2.0" they mean blogs, video, RSS feeds.

DevCentral is an example of Web 2.0, the business version. We've got blogs, video (no DRM, thank you), podcasts, forums, articles, and it's all wrapped together nice as pie.

But DevCentral is also an example of utilizing Web 2.0. Some of the wizardry done behind the scenes and added to by the team is pure Web 2.0 nirvana.

So we get a lot of press about the end-user or business person version of Web 2.0, Jeff and John McAdam have talked about with the press about it repeatedly, people point to DevCentral as the definition of vendor-sponsored community, the list goes on.

The flip side of this is that not much is talked about Web 2.0 from a development perspective. DevCentral is a good example of that, and our ADN (Application Delivery Network) technology is a cornerstone of Web 2.0 networks. Lori is helping people understand the issues in her blog, and we're adding more and more Web 2.0 content all of the time.

That gives you yet another reason to hang out on DevCentral, the Web 2.0 Networking site - because it is both, Web 2.0 and Web 2.0.

Now if only we could get someone to use more intelligent naming - Like Web 2.0 and Development 2.0 or something - so that we're all a little less confused about what, exactly, we're talking about.

Don.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, SOA, Application Development

Drinking: Water, coffee, Moutain Dew (seriously, all sitting around my laptop right now).

Reading: Flames of War 2.0 (link is very slow - they don't have a genius like Joe keeping their DNN installation performing)

Some Days You Just Aren't.

Don MacVittie — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:47:47 GMT

I've been writing code for a long time. And I'm good at it. I think anyone who claims to be "the best" at a given language is an idiot and I immediately tune them out, so I don't ever make such claims. But I can crank out a lot of code and understand some cryptic crap when I need to.

So days when the brain fails to engage are either humorous or painful. Today was one of those days. I've been cranking on the Blackberry BigIP interface, and have large chunks of it done, complete with a class library for all you MIDP junkies to use when it's complete. I spent an hour trying to figure out why a return set was coming back from the BigIP empty. These web services are pretty darned sound, so I knew that it wasn't likely the system doing it, and the Blackberry app is replicating pages on the web management console, so I could look and see that an empty set was not correct...

So I sent it over to Joe Pruitt and asked him to look at the request and response as they were going across the wire. Ten minutes (or less) later, he wrote me back "you're looking for the members of the VLAN, but the parameter you're sending looks like the port."

I no sooner read that than I smacked my head. I had started to build the VLAN list, but then sidetracked to build the response classes for what I was actually doing - getting the list of members of a given VLAN - and forgot to finish getting the list of available VLANS. I was calling it with a port list instead.

Duh.

Well, happens to everyone, just have to pick up and move on. But man I hate to waste time like that.

Based on my current reading, I'll blame the KGB, or GRU, or whatever they're going by these days :-).

Don.

imbibing: Caramel coffee and water

reading: The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew,

Blackberry, meet BigIP

Don MacVittie — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 18:07:10 GMT

I've been awfully quiet the last couple of weeks, locked away tracking down the options and testing out some theories on using iControl with the Blackberry.

I'm now to the point where I'm willing to talk about what I found and how I've settled on it, not yet to the point where it's anywhere near a complete deliverable.

The goal was simple - give a management interface to admins through their Blackberry. The problem is that Blackberry has seriously muddied the water about Java development for enterprise-class products. Just a few of the issues - their "enterprise class" solution (MDS) is to put a web server between the user and their application that proxies requests from the Blackberry and serves up responses. That would be fine if you had the time and inclination to configure a separate webserver. We felt that was too much to ask - easy enough in my test environment, not a viable option in most enterprises.

So after toying with that option we played with the Blackberry JDE and the Sun JDE. The Blackberry JDE was short some functionality, and the Sun JDE can't generate .COD files. So I could get both to work partially, but neither to do the job.

Then I took a look at kSOAP2 - a project that offers lightweight SOAP support for Java - aimed at MIDP-based devices. I had played with kSOAP, and it wasn't very good - poorly documented and error prone. kSOAP2 is better, though it's still tough to play with, at least most of its issues are documentation.

At this point the "System Information" page is completed, and the network statistics page is well on its way. The final configuration of the development environment includes the following class libraries:
kSOAP
kObjects
kXML
XML-Pull

And the new library that I'm building as I develop the pages. The new library is BigIP specific and will be available when it's completed - though it will require kSOAP, which requires the other k* libraries listed above.

It's bigger than I'd like - about 87.5K and growing - but still reasonable on the Blackberry.

The only oddity I haven't been able to resolve yet is that the kSOAP class that handles http basic authorization returns with just the auth cookie on the first call, and the library doesn't handle it correctly. Not a big deal, it just appears to fail, and you catch the error and resubmit, but it is a bit clunky.

There you have it. I've created a thread on the forums to discuss the project in case anyone is interested. Go there

Here's a picture of the System Information page from our test BigIP

Yeah, I'm having fun, isn't that what work is for?

Don.

Reading: The Blitzkrieg Myth, John Mosier
Imbibing: Water and coffee

Careful what you wish for...

Don MacVittie — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 01:15:28 GMT

Well, I'm working on a Blackberry application that uses Web Services as the backend. This should be a relatively simple thing to implement since the Blackberry supports Jax on-client, right?

It would be, but the crowd at RIM agreed with me - some solutions are not suited to the XML-everywhere craze. And cell phone networks are, in their opinion, one of those solutions.

I've worked in Cell Phones (CDMA only), and can understand where they are coming from. XML is a bandwidth hog, and cell phone data packets aren't exactly the fastest solution on the Internet.

But from the developer perspective, what a PITA. Yeah, I said it. But my issues are with implementation, not their conclusions.

You see, the world is demanding that they support web services, because everything (and I do mean everything) has moved that direction, whether that was a wise choice or not. Seems simplification is more important than performance these days. Now if you're the owner of the BlackBerry, I would think that, facing the realization that something must be done, and owning a Java-based device with an XML parser already installed, you would just support web services directly.

They didn't. Instead, the team at RIM spent a bunch of time and money putting together the MDS - a web-server generating tool that communicates with Blackberries via IP on the front end and Web Services on the backend, translating web services responses into their own proprietary data format.

Unwise, IMO. But that's the path they've chosen to take. I've played with MDS before, and pitched it because I wanted a better way. This time I need a solution that is reliable and expandable, so I'm back to MDS.

I'm not a fan of "embedded Windows" - if you've ever taken an uncritical look at how that system is put together, the phrase is akin to saying "small skyscraper", or "miniature elephant". But if RIM wanted to hand a market segment over to MS, this is a good step in that direction.

I'm considering parsing the responses myself and bypassing the issue. No, it's not easy. That's okay, I'm a glutton for punishment, and at least we won't have to throw up another server. Too bad their push methodology is tied to http, I need https.

While I'm not down to using MDS yet, I have reinstalled it and started up a project, just in case.

You never know, I might end up having to use it.

Don

Imbibing: Red Bull and Mt. Dew
Reading: Not much this week other than BlackBerry developer docs.

It's about Extensibility

Don MacVittie — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:44:00 GMT

I'm not a fan of tech blogs being positioning of any kind, but since I'm new here and have seen some things "in the wild", you'll get the occasional one of these from me.

While I was still working for Network Computing, I had a conversation with a competitor to F5 where they pitched their solution as better than BigIP becaues it didn't require coding. And thus was easier to use.

These were always fun conversations to have as a writer - you can roll your eyes, put them on speaker phone to let Lori listen, take extensive (and in egregious cases impertinent) notes, and ask piercing questions like "So you're saying iRules and iControl are required to use F5 products?" then listen to the pregnant pause or indignant sputtering because you've interrupted their presentation. This scenario is fortunately not common, but some conversations pass beyond the bounds of acceptability and require a snappy comment to make the presenter aware that you know your market, and lies aren't going to sell.

But I'm not here to talk about the fun NWC writers have trying to bring you unbiased information. The thing that concerns me is that this same vendor may be selling this schtick to you, and that some of you haven't spent enough time in the space to understand the difference, so as my first public service announcement, I'll tell you something F5 has been saying (with greater and lesser success) for years:

iRules and iControl are all about extensibility, flexibility, and adaptability.

It's that simple. And that's what DevCentral is here for. F5 products can do as much as competitors for you out-of-the-box, but no one - not us or the competition - can account for all of the things you might wish to do within your own network. Giving you the tools to do for yourself what vendors aren't doing is not a weight that drags you down, it is a buoy that lifts you out of the sea of network performance and security. And DevCentral is a resource to help you use those tools.

So if you get caught up in one of these conversations, remember that F5 products are competitive without iRules and iControl, these programmatic interfaces are just another tool in your toolchest to help you solve your users problems and lighten the natural tension between the Network team and the AppDev team.

Of course, if you're a DevCentral member, you already knew all of this, but this one's for all the casual surfers and Enterprise Architects out looking for new ways to solve their problems.

Don.

Imbibing: Strong coffee and Mountain Dew

Reading: Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson