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 ...

GTM Classless Classes

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:...

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...

Microsoft Exchange 2010 iRule Workflow Visualized

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...

iRules Community Spotlight: Same Segment Load Balancing

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...

The Wait is Over: Edit Your iRules on Linux!

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...

The New DevCentral: Getting Started

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. ...

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...