Testing the F5 itself with a simple test

Hi,

I have a goal to monitor my F5's from completelt outside the environment as if they were a client connection. Obviously it's possible to get very fancy on this, but I just need to know for the moment that the F5 is up and running, passing traffic and irules are being processed.

I have a couple of Virtual Servers on my F5 which have a couple of irules attached; one with complex logic which directs the connection to any number of pools and other just doing some "clean up"

What I want to do is create either a separate irule or insert extra logic in the exisiting one which is processed first which responds with a HTTP 200 etc. when a specfic, magic, hidden URL is requested; if this is "hit" I don't want any subsequent irule to be processed for the sake of processor efficiency.

The failure of a single pool or member would not tell me what I need to know as it could be down for any number of reasons, but I still need to know whether it is processing and responding correctly.

So my thought was this:

when HTTP_REQUEST {
if { [HTTP::URI] equals "/HelloThereAnyoneHome.htm"} {
      HTTP::respond 200 content {
      
         
            Test Page
         
         
            No-one here but us Chickens! 
         
      
    }
    event disable all
  }
}

Essentially, my external test host would request the page /HelloThereAnyoneHome.htm, and look for the text "No-one here but us Chickens!" In this context, whether ANY pool member is up is irrelevant, I just want to get a simple, clean "hello" out of the F5, with any

Any other response would cause an alarm..

Thanks a lot!