Forum Discussion

sriramgd_111845's avatar
sriramgd_111845
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Apr 21, 2011

F5 and Source Control

Recently, we have been adding more business logic to our iRules and this has led to increased configuration on the F5 for our releases. As a result of this, we have had some accidents due to cumulative changes made by different release groups.

 

 

We dont release from source control to the F5. We just store the F5 configuration in our source control on a periodic basis. We are considering running a job which gets the configuration on a regular basis and checks it into our source control, so users can compare their changes before deploying them.

 

 

We have 2 choices, was wondering which would be better:

 

1. Install our source control client on the LTM box, read the config and check into source control.

 

2. Use iControl (or any other method) to get the configuration from a separate box where we check the files into source control.

 

 

I know 1. is probably not a good idea since we dont want to put jobs and agents on the F5, but it was put forward as an option. Any recommendation on this? Are there any other options I can use. Thanks

2 Replies

  • For a sustainable solution, number 2 is far better. Your first option is doable, but every upgrade/hotfix will likely blow away your client.
  • You could also script an SSH solution to do this, but Jason is right - iControl has it all built right in, so it's by far the easiest to use that. A use case like 1 is actually the very reason iControl is so capable; we help get you around having to deal with customizing the box, which isn't ideal for several reasons.

     

     

    -Matt