Technical Article pyControl - Shell Usage Updated 17-Apr-2010•Originally posted on 12-Jun-2008 by Joe Pruitt F5 article application delivery dev devops icontrol irules isv techtip In the second part of this video tutorial series on pyControl, F5's Matt Cauthorn follows up on the installation of pyControl with a walkthrough of how to use it from within the python shell. 0 Ratings Log in to rate this content Print Download Share Comments on this Article Comment made 15-Jun-2008 by jgarcia 0 Hi Matt !I've really enjoyed your pycontrol api videos , but i have two questions for you1) what kind of service is listening in the BIGIP that answers to the pycontrol functions , is this secure? ssl, limited and stuff2)i work a lot with nagios and this would be great for monitoring the status of the loadbalancers , but whats the real meaning of this iControl thing?Is this related with the Whitehat assessment ?Thanks a lot! and keep it up with the entertainment and educational videos. 0 Comment made 16-Jun-2008 by Joe Pruitt F5 Glad you liked the video. I'll try to answer your questions for you.First, iControl is our remote management API that is implemented as a set of web services listening on our ssl based administrative interface. It uses the same security and authorization as our admin GUI does so you can count on it being secure.As for your second question, I think I answered that in #1 but if you want more details on what iControl is, check out the iControl section of the documentation where you can get a good backgrounder as well as links to the documentation - http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=76. BTW, python is only the latest of the languages we support. If you use perl, java, .Net (C# or VB) or python, then we have helper libraries to get your started. For all other languages that support web services, you can import our WSDL documents directly into your framework. If you have more questions feel free to post them on the iControl forums and we'll do our best to answer your concerns.-Joe 0