DevCentral
There are 39 entries for the tag DevCentral
Day two of the New DevCentral. I’m excited about the new look, but I’m especially excited about the new functionality and navigation. There are a few things that have changed that might stump the seasoned pros, and of course if you’re a newbie, well, it’s all new, right? To that end, we’ve created a page of brief video tutorials on how to get the most out of DevCentral: Getting Started. We thought about the issues most users might have with the initial jump, such as the new social features, the forum changes with a migration to groups, site navigation, etc. ...
There have been several questions over the past month in the iControl forum as to whether or not pyControl works on linux. In the pyControl labs information, there are instructions for install on Microsoft Windows based systems, but not for linux, so maybe this is the source of confusion. This is not so much that pyControl isn't linux compatible as it is that the installation instructions on the many flavors of linux vary. In reality, the only step that should be different between the distributions is the first step: installing python. Now, on my flavor of choice, Ubuntu, python 2.6...
Hey Community! Just a gentle nudge that we are still accepting entries for the iRules Contest through 5pm pacific on the 30th of September. Yes, that's only 15 days from now! I see several iRules flying by in the forums each week that are no brainers for consideration. Take this nice example from the forums: Forum iRule from user UZimmerman when HTTP_REQUEST {
set downtimepool "Downtime-NonSSL"
set downtimemember "10.21.67.103"
set downtimeport "16080"
set downtime 0
if { ([LB::status pool $downtimepool member $downtimemember $downtimeport]...
I'm a visual learner. You know this about me. I've said as much in earlier posts (Me Caveman, Need Picture). So it should come as no surprise that I'll be highlighting a picture here. A picture is worth a thous...yada yada yada, you get it. I see many drawings, all of which are purposed to convey some type of information. This, however, is a visual treasure chest building on the event ordering goodness discussed by Colin a while back that hones in on the flow of data through the iRules events specific to the HTTP protocol. If you develop iRules...
It's iRules Contest time again, community! I wasn't new to F5 products for the first contest, as I was a version 4.5 user for a couple years, but I was relatively new to the v9 TCL-based iRules. I was working on a couple different projects at the time, one with terminal server and one with some multi-site SSL redirection challenges, that brought me full force into the DevCentral experience. F5ers Joe, Colin, Deb & unRuleY nurtured me along, taking time out of their schedules to assist in my learning curve. This community that I now get to share in serving...
For various reason's, one might wish not to advertise to the world the version of BIND running on the GTM. The fix action is to add two lines to the options section of the named.conf file (See Below). This can be done at the command line by editing /var/named/config/named.conf, or by editing said file via the GUI. If done in the GUI, named is restarted for you, if done at the command line, you'll need restart manually (bigstart restart named). Anway, the lines you'll need to obfuscate the version are: query-source address * port 53; version "x.y.z"; You...
It's always a good day when I can combine great food with great geekery. Kansas City kicked off its initial user group meeting in style, serving up some excellent BBQ courtesy of the fine folks at Jack Stack BBQ. I've dined occasionally at the Overland Park location, but this is my first time at the Freight House. Everyone says location, location, location, is all that matters, but in this case, it doesn't. Both locations serve up some mighty fine BBQ. I steered clear of the ribs (I know, I'm crying) this time since I was presenting, but the turkey...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you c ould throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter W is a two-for-one special: Wireshark & Webmin. I'll start with Wireshark (formerly Ethereal),...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter V is for Vim. Vim is a cross-platform console and GUI text editor that...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter U is for Umbraco, an open-source .NET based content management system. There are no...
Welcome back for another (long overdue) episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter T is for TightVNC. TightVNC is a remote desktop option for *nix/windows...
DevCentral community user mkelly kicked in some excellent Ruby contributions a while back with some scripts that Colin wrapped some documentation around in an article series back in January: Ruby meets iControl: Creating VIPs Ruby Meets iControl: Switching Policies Ruby Meets iControl: Making WideIPs This week, another community member, josb, contributed a SOAP4R wrapper for iControl. I'm not familiar at all with Ruby, but I downloaded the windows version of the language (sorry Colin), installed the SOAP4R gem, and tried out josb's scripts. Here's one example: GetPools.rb #!/usr/bin/env ruby
# vim:expandtab shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2
require 'f5'
Kernel.abort "Usage: #{$0} endpoint...
I'd like to think that the community was on vacation last week, or that the winning entry, which happened to be the first and only entry, was so brilliant that it scared everyone off. A week ago Friday, I kicked off what I hope will be a frequent experience, opening up a simple optimization contest to the community in the forums. The challenge was to take the dice rolling iRule from Lori's post on multi-classing your load balancer, optimize it, and submit it. One community user, natty76, took the challenge. So, by default, natty76, you are the Optimize This! inaugural...
It's not an uncommon problem trying to figure out where to plant that sorry page in the event your farm is down. It's also not an uncommon solution to just use your BIG-IP to issue a text-only HTTP::respond. It works, but it's not, how do you say, visually appealing? You want to say sorry and mean it. With pictures. If you take a stroll through the iRules codeshare, you'll notice several solutions to this problem. All of them work, with a variety of methods, but user kirkbauer's entry takes it to another level. Kirk's sorry page irule generator (written in...
I've long been a fan of Tobi Oetiker's RRDTool. It's fun to play with on its own, but it's also the basis for many open-source management platforms, and for some it's a component of a much larger platform. Heck, it's everywhere...it's even baked into the BIG-IP performance graphs. I've used it for many years and for many different purposes, but it intersected with my F5 world a few years back when I needed more granular views into the data than the BIG-IP graphs provided and my very expensive commercial tools didn't support the indexed mibs at the time. My RRDTool...
I'm always fascinated by the creative outlets people come up with when toying with iRules. My favorite is still Joe's FTP Hunt the Wumpus, which he blogged about a while back (the code is here in the wiki). The latest is a great entry from Lori this morning, giving you, the community, a handy dice roller. After a careful read, a few thoughts came to mind, in no particular order. Wow, what a great way to collide two completely independent planets in the geek solar system. Role playing games take too much time, I just want to load...
The BIG-IP WebAccelerator joins ranks with the Local Traffic Manager and the Global Traffic Manager as modules that received some major upgrades with version 10. Not familiar with the WebAccelerator? Affectionately called WA in these parts, the WebAccelerator is "an advanced Web application delivery solution that provides a series of intelligent technologies that overcome performance issues involving browsers, Web application platforms, and WAN latency." That's straight from the glossy, I couldn't say it any better than that. The DevCentral team has been filming a documentary series (Real IT, check it out!) on speeding up the site for our users in...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter S is for Sysinternals. Acquired by Microsoft back in 2006, Sysinternals is a massive suite...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter R is for RT. RT, or Request Tracker, is a very efficient and customizable open-source...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter Q is for Qcheck. Qcheck is a free network utility available from IXIA that...
The browser wars don't interest me that much. Personally, I want my browser to a) present my content in a pleasing intended way and b) not crash. All the rest is gravy. That said, I use both IE and Firefox, the former as it is best suited (or required) for some of the administrative tasks on my plate, and the latter because I prefer it. So I downloaded Internet Explorer 8 this morning because I was curious about how well the touted gains in performance would bear out. Before installing IE8, I tested Firefox 3 and IE7 against DevCentral to...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) I just realized looking back at the last entry for Nagios that it's been two weeks! Where...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter N is for Nagios. Nagios is a web-based monitoring platform primarily focused on host and...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter M is for MaxQ. No, not the high-flying performance bar of my beloved St. Louis...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter K is for Knoppix. Knoppix is no longer unique now that pretty much every linux distribution...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter J is for Jail. Actually, the *nix command is chroot, but it has long been affectionately...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter I is for Iperf. Iperf is an open-source tool for measuring max TCP or UDP...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter H is for HPing, a command line utility with origins in security but robust enough...
I read several articles this morning declaring that load balancers days are numbered. I wish this were true, and it should be true, but no amount of press can prevent organizations from continuing to resurrect the "King." Much like those who continue to hand money over at the box office to the Jason & Freddy franchises, as long as companies fork lift the old and insert the new without any forethought into what might be possible with a new platform, they will continue to deploy load balancers in load-balancing replacement projects, no matter how powerful the shiny new application delivery...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter G is for Ganglia. Ganglia is an open-source monitoring system specifically designed to meet the...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter F is for FreeRADIUS, an open-source package allowing administrators to host a RADIUS (remote...
Wow, what a night! We officially launched DevCentral-China last night (US perspective, it was a morning launch in China). I really didn't know what to expect, but I have to tell you--it was wildly cool. Jeff built a page on DevCentral for the live event, incorporating streaming video feeds from Shanghai where Dan Matte, our Senior VP of Marketing presented with the F5 China team at an Internet cafe, F5 corporate with Jeff, Joe, & Colin, and from the US Midwest with me & Don. Also on the page: a live chat session for panelists and guests alike, integrating...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter E is for Enterprise Manager, F5's own home-grown appliance for managing the Big-IP product...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter D is for DummyNet, a network protocol testing package first implemented in 1998 in the...
Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM. What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter C is for Cacti, a web-based network graphing solution based on Tobi Oetiker's excellent...
What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter B is for backups, and I realize I'm only on letter number two and I'm already cheating. That's ok, though, it's my blog. I could...
What's NSM you say? We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well. We'll work our way through the alphabet over the next several weeks looking at tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there. By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title (I couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter A is for arpwatch, a utility that keeps track of mac/IP pairings. This has obvious upside for making sure IP's aren't switching in non-DHCP...
You know it, and I know. At the end of the day, those who own the box are on the hook for failures. Said owners, therefore, are not so eager to let you on the lot to kick the tires, and they certainly are not going to let you take a test drive. I get that. Risk is scary, and consequences are real. Enter partitions. First introduced in version 9.4, partitions allow the BigIP administrators to grant twofold access to the system: what objects can be accessed, and what the user with rights to that partition can do with those...
Every now and then someone pushes out a utility that just makes you yell "YES, that's exactly what I never knew I always wanted." BCV, or BigIP Config Visualizer, is one of those utilities. You supply a bigip.conf file, and BCV presents you with an image file for every virtual server defined in the config. Your images can be exported in jpg, png, or svg format. Exporting via svg gives you the ability to open (and edit) the image in Visio, which is pretty handy. Here's a snapshot of a lab vip: F5er Micheal Thompson cranked this out...
