BIG-IP Configuration Object Naming Conventions

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 ...

Stop that F5 Key From Refreshing the Page

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!) ...

BIG-IP Configuration Conversion Scripts

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 ...

IP::addr and IPv6

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...

Benefits of Desktop Virtualization

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...

Networking Options with LTM VE

If you haven’t yet downloaded the  BIG-IP LTM VE trial, I highly suggest you do.  It is a fully-functional LTM, rate-limited to 1Mbps throughput.  If you’re not familiar with virtualized environments, hopefully this blog will fill in some blanks for how to get started on the network front. Getting Started Before downloading your VE image, you need to choose what virtualization environment you’re installing into.  The supported options in the type 1 hypervisor are VMWare ESX version 4 and ESXi version 4.  For the type 2 hypervisor (requiring a host OS such as linux or Microsoft Windows) the supported option is VMWare...