Forum Discussion
Craig_Jackson_1
Sep 21, 2006Nimbostratus
I think devcentral is a good start. But working with F5 is in general quite frustrating.
The biggest problem is the lack of documentation. The Wiki is a good start. But I'm filled with urges to fill it with annotations such as "It seems like it really works this way, contrary to what's here" or "There appears to be another option/keyword that does XXX".
This is, of course, for the things that have non-stub entries in the first place.
A wiki is good if it can be a community effort. But only a small part of the iRule community (the F5 employees working on iRules support) have access to the actual documentation, which appears to be the source code.
The second problem with devcentral is that it's limited to iRules and iControl, etc. There are no forums for general F5 issues. If you have questions about general things like OneConnect or profiles, you're SOL. (I had a problem last Fall with proxy servers and persistence. It took me about a month to get support to tell me to turn on OneConnect. I'm a bit gun-shy about calling support now. I got the impression that they're primarily trained on break-fixing failing hardware.)
And yes, I've said all of this to both my salesman and my sales support engineer.
The F5 is a good, powerful product. If only it were better documented and supported.