Jason Rahm
There are 71 entries for the tag Jason Rahm
It’s a crazy world out there. I ran (well, by “ran” I mean jogged slowly enough to pass the old ladies on the track) this morning at the YMCA, lifted weights for a little while, and then hit the elliptical for 20 minutes before heading home. My gym’s ellipticals have the Nike+ package where you can store your workouts on your iPhone/iPod, and without thinking I jacked in. Approximately 38 ms later (my internal meter is not calibrated) I facepalmed and disconnected my iPhone in shame. Have I learned nothing? Turns out, after closer inspection, the cable was a...
George posted an excellent blog on hostname nomenclature a while back, but something we haven’t discussed much in this space is a naming convention for the BIG-IP configuration objects. Last week, DevCentral community user Deon posted a question on exactly that. Sometimes there are standards just for the sake of having one, but in most cases, and particularly in this case, having standards is a very good thing. Señor Forum, hoolio, and MVP hamish weighed in with some good advice. [app name]_[protocol]_[object type] Examples: www.example.com_http_vs www.example.com_http_pool ...
No, not “us” F5, the F5 key on the keyboard. You know, the one you hit relentlessly to refresh the page (well, the one I hit relentlessly during NFL games to update my fantasy football stats). Anyway, I was perusing the forums today, trying to catch up from a week attending our very excellent annual sales conference, and I noticed a thread that had to be shared. The Question Is there a way of preventing users from using the F5 button to refresh a web page? – DevCentral user ringoseagull (nice handle, btw!) ...
Last Friday I attended my first BSides event in Missouri’s capitol (literally in the capitol building!) Jefferson City. The BSides community exists to bring fellow security practitioners together to present and participate in a small-scale environment that encourages collaboration. I’m not the outgoing sort and I generally like to fade into the background and just learn, but this environment really lends itself well to establishing relationships with others. There were quite a few St Louis based individuals and the chatter is already taking off for setting up a BSides event closer to home in the Spring. Two tracks were offered...
July was a busy month. I took the first three weeks off and drove much of what’s left of the “mother road” on Historic Route 66.with the family, our Ford Expedition, and way too many nights in our 31’ travel trailer. Great memories and stories for a lifetime out of that trip. I was home long enough to unpack, do laundry, and repack for a great week in Chicago with the DevCentral team. On Monday, we had a great time diving in to F5 technology goodness with the MVPs (and hoolio and Chris Miller!) at the Thinkubator. It was a...
Don’t get me wrong, regex is awesome, and entirely useful—sometimes it’s the only option, it’s just not the best tool of choice for wire speed applications. Often the sys-admin and network type converts to BIG-IP will find the regexp tcl command and go that route because it’s familiar. If that describes you, please let me introduce you to a couple more appropriate commands: scan string These two commands will cover a great percentage of regexp’s use cases, and will save significant resources on the system. Don’t buy it? Here’s...
DevCentral community member geffr had a problem. The BIG-IP Application Security Manager module logs to the local3 facility but he needs to send them to the local7 facility on a remote server. Before giving up entirely, he posted to this thread in the Monitoring & Management group forum, where user nitass helped him jump through the syslog-ng hoops (click here for tips & tricks on syslog-ng) to the working solution posted below. It’s pretty straight forward. Define a template, a filter, and a destination, and then put the pieces together in a log statement. ...
I’ve posted on this before (Host that Sorry Page on your BIG-IP!) but it’s been a while and there have been a few updates. Besides, narrowing the application to only sorry pages is a bit myopic—I’m sure my BIG-IP is offended that I treated it so callously. Anyway, I got an inquiry a week or so ago about the images in tables not being picked up by the script. The images in the table were referenced as such: #<table background="genericofflinebackground.gif" align="center" width="1024" height="768" >
I reached out to...
User Ralph Hoflich dropped an interesting problem off in the forums for his first post evah…he had a wireshark capture with a highly unusual header name: Yes, the header name was “:”. This is interesting as it is also the separator in headers between the field name/value pair as described in rfc 2616 section 4.2. Thankfully, it’s just another character and is parsed out as such with iRules. So the simple task of removing a header like this is completed painlessly (as Ralph suspected in his own question). I added a couple logging statements to check before/after...
Being the incredible horrible planner I am, I started to order invitations early last week for a party I’m throwing for my wife’s graduation and it turns out they wanted double the cost of the invitations in overnight shipping! So…I sent evites. It took a day, however, to actually get them out. I started the process but was interrupted by the EC2 outage. I only know that for sure because the evite site I used was very quick to tell me in their error message that the problem was with the “Amazon EC2 Datacenter.” Was Amazon down? Yes. Is it...
Two of our biggest internal contributors, Kirk Bauer and John Alam, are at it again with a handful of perl scripts aimed at easing your migration from some of the “other guys” to BIG-IP. While they aren’t going to map every nook and cranny of the configurations to a BIG-IP feature, they will get you well along the way, taking out as much of the human error element as possible. I built a few pages in the Advanced Design & Configuration wiki to host these scripts. Migrating from Cisco ACE, CSM, or CSS ...
I love ingenuity. DevCentral community member wassim asked a question a little more than a month ago that has been asked several times before: How do you build a class in GTM so you don’t have to use a hoard of if statements to account for your addresses? Well, classes (datagroups) aren’t yet supported in GTM iRules, so the options have been sparse. One option that could be utilized is to build a list that you can initialize in RULE_INIT: 1:...
Did you know that all address internal to tmm are kept in IPv6 format? If you’ve written external monitors, I’m guessing you knew this. In the external monitors, for IPv4 networks the IPv6 “header” is removed with the line: IP=`echo $1 | sed 's/::ffff://'`
IPv4 address are stored in what’s called “IPv4-mapped” format. An IPv4-mapped address has its first 80 bits set to zero and the next 16 set to one, followed by the 32 bits of the IPv4 address. The prefix looks like this:
0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff: (abbreviated as ::ffff:, which looks strickingly simliar—ok, identical—to the pattern...
F5’s own John Alam sent over his latest Visio creation to share with the DevCentral community. This diagram details the workflow of the comprehensive exchange services iRule described in the Microsoft Exchange 2010 Deployment Guide. Enjoy. For visio, pdf, png, & svg versions of this image, click here. Related Articles Microsoft Exchange 2010: HELO New Architecture Webcast - Microsoft Exchange Server Availability And Scalability Exchange Persistence Duality and iRules > DevCentral > F5 ... How Microsoft deployed Exchange Server...
I got a request yesterday morning to asking if there was a way to drop HTTP requests if a certain number was referenced in the Accept-Language header. The user referenced this post on Exploring Binary. The number, 2.2250738585072012e-308, causes the Java runtime and compiler to go into an infinite loop when converting it to double-precision binary floating-point. Not good. Twitter is ablaze on the issue, and there is a good discussion thread on Hacker News as well. So how do you stop it? At first, this appeared to be a no-brainer, just copy that string and drop if found in...
I received an update to the HTTP Event Order diagram last night from the excellent F5er John Alam. Here it is, in all its glory!
Fire up the printer, the laminator, whatever, and get this on your cubicle wall pronto! For comparison, the original drawing is in the second link below. For visio, pdf, and svg versions of this image, click here.
Related Articles
iRules Event Order > DevCentral > F5 DevCentral > Tech Tips
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Stacking iRules: A Modular Approach > DevCentral > F5 DevCentral...
Sad, I know. But I had Shakespeare on the brain this morning, and whereas I’m pretty sure he’ll roll over in his grave at me identifying with him in the same blog post as what’s below, well, I figured I’d tap into my (not so) creative side. An Homage to LTM Gather my packets, LTM And give to all comprising flows Careful analysis on which to Accept or deny my humble requests. ...
We’ve covered pushing images from LTM before with Kirk’s excellent perl script work on sorry pages. But that’s not the only thing you can host images for, and it’s not the only approach. DevCentral community user kevin.stewart crafted up a nifty bash script to achieve the same ends, and gobbles up every image in /var/images, b64 encodes them, then drops them into a class. The script is minimal in lines, but powerful in output: #!/bin/bash ## clear /var/class_build/images_build.class echo -n "" > /var/class/images.class; ## loop through...
A few weeks ago Lori nailed it with a post (The 2048-bit Keys to the Kingdom) on the coming forced migration to 2048-bit keys. A few days prior, I got a call from “THE” Matt Cauthorn, DevCentral resident stud contributor L4L7 about the very same issue. Not surprisingly, he was ahead of the game on this and has spent some time developing a tool that will take the mystery out of the licensing and infrastructure impact checklist items Lori mentioned. Well what does this tool do? Function ...
On last week’s podcast, we riffed for a few on the common misunderstandings of what a URL versus a URI are in terms of writing iRules and communicating said development in the forums. I had earlier in the day been looking at Prezi and got the idea that I should attempt my first Prezi on breaking down the various components of a URL and URI. Be gentle: Related Articles HTTPS Redirect for a specific URL, URI - DevCentral - F5 ... multiple url/uri rewrite w/multiple default statements ... ...
Microsoft released advisory 2416728 on Friday after researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo demonstrated the attack on ASP.NET with their Padding Oracle Exploit Tool. The attack itself preys on a bug in ASP.NET’s AES implementation, which you can read about over here at threatpost. So what’s the reward for a successful attack? It’s not going to allow the attacker to execute code or elevate rights, but it does all the attacker to read potentially sensitive data that could then be further used to compromise the system. The mitigation for this attack is to obfuscate the server errors by ensuring...
Most of the files I use in my virtual desktop environment are centrally located in a share I make accessible to the host and all the guests for ease of transfer between them. However, there is one guest I keep fairly isolated for security reasons. This is great, but when I need a file, it (has previously) required me to start that guest, wait, login, move the files I need to the share, then shutdown. It’s frequent enough to be annoying. I’d leave it up, but I prefer to keep my BIG-IP LTM VE and a couple linux guests running...
This has been a perplexing issue for many users. How do you introduce an intermediary (LTM going forward) between client and server when in the same network segment? It’s easy when the LTM sits at gateways, but within a segment, it doesn’t work that well without some help. Why? Well, with tcp-based connection-oriented protocols, a handshake (consisting of a client syn packet, a server syn-ack packet, and a server ack packet) sets up the connection. When you introduce the LTM, a problem arises: Client –> syn –> BIG-IP BIG-IP –> syn-ack –> Client...
We’re tasked with the burden of hosting the MVP Summit in the Edelweiss II conference room on the 43rd floor of the Swissotel Chicago. Here are a couple views of the Chicago landscape. The first is a shot of Navy Pier from the elevator lobby. The second is a portion of the view from Edelweiss II. Not shabby. Not shabby at all. Technorati Tags: F5 DevCentral,DevCentral MVP,DevCentral MVP Summit,Chicago,Jason Rahm
As Jeff posted this morning, we’re well into our DevCentral MVP Summit here in Chicago. During one of the challenge solution reveals, Matt Cauthorn (yes, THE Matt Cauthorn) showed a bigpipe command that I really wish I knew about years ago. Actually, the command isn’t new, but range ability within the command is what caused the jaw to hit the floor. [root@kitchensink:Active] config # b pool newPool { members 192.168.{1..2}.{1..3}:80 } [root@kitchensink:Active] config # b pool newPool list pool newPool { ...
No, not the kiddie lit favorite by Doris Buchanan Smith, I mean the smart phones. I was not a member of the smart phone club when I started at F5. In fact, my first week on the job was at our international sales conference and I remember watching Jeff and Joe scroll, click, and type like the wind and Jeff leaned over and said, “They’re addicting, you’ll see.” I got my first Blackberry, the Curve 8310, a week later. I liked having all the keys for typing, as the limited texts I’d written with the basic phones was a chore,...
There is an abundance of mature desktop virtualization solutions that are outright free or at least reasonable. From VMware’s Workstation (at cost after 30-day trial, but entirely worth it) to Oracle’s VirtualBox and Microsoft’s Virtual PC, you can get started in literally minutes. Why would you want to? Trivial backups. Tired of losing a drive and having to restore first the OS, then the applications, and finally your files? Once everything is hosted on a virtual disk, keeping that backed up frequently means a physical disk failure costs you only the time to restore the hardware...
So I guess I’m on the even days plan here at Tech Ed, today being the fourth and final day of Tech Ed… Yesterday I got the chance to walk around the exhibitor hall and collect swag take a look at the exciting offerings on the floor. Microsoft had three very large sections with breakout booths for all their product offerings. I stopped and chatted with a few experts in the Server 2008 R2 virtualization offerings, and watched a couple System Center demos as well. Speaking of System Center, did you know F5 has a management pack for System Center? ...
DevCentral has many rock star contributors. Most are not affiliated officially with F5 Networks, or DevCentral for that matter, but there are several F5ers who believe in the community, and really believe in the F5 story. One of those F5ers is Matt Cauthorn, or as you know him in the community, L4L7. You may recognize Matt as the author of pyControl. Well, not only did he provide this entrance to a better iControl experience, he has also delivered in a major way with his Vim plugin for editing iRules (utilizing pyControl of course to make those calls to BIG-IP). I...
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...
Hello, version 10! Product launches are always exciting, for the vendors as well as the vendees, and this is no exception. I was a customer when F5 made the jump to v9, and having used the BIG-IP/3-DNS products for a couple years at that point, I was a little concerned at the magnitude of change. That evaporated quickly as I began navigating around the UI and diving into the pleasure that is iRules. So it is today with the announcement of version 10. There is an astounding level of product growth in v.10, not just with GTM, but that's our...
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.) Today's letter P is for Pyrlshell, my made up word for Perl, Python, & Powershell. All...
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 L is for Looking Glass. A looking glass is a web front-end (or in some...
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...
