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Hamish's avatar
Hamish
Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
Jun 14, 2010

Refresh From Server?

Hmm... I found another 'nice to have' for iRule editor a couple of weeks back... We had two people working on a single F5 (In the lab) at once. I've found that the iRule editor just assumes that it's local copy of the iRule is the most up to date... So when you come along an hour later & start to type and then save, the changes made 30 minutes earlier by someone else then seem to get over-written...

 

 

Any chance of the editor makign a check and presenting

 

 

1. The option to re-download an iRule when a user starts typing on a stale iRule

 

2. Checking when saving and providing a diff of changes between what the editor thought was the real copy and reality?

 

 

And an easy way to tell the iRule editor to reload from the server instead of having to disconnect and re-connect again...

 

 

4 Replies

  • Nice idea...

     

     

    Once note: you can reload the config from LTM using the refresh button. There doesn't seem to be a menu option for this, but the button should work for your scenario.

     

     

    Aaron
  • Yeah, as hoolio said, the button on the right above the iRule list is to refresh the list of iRules from the server. Keep in mind that this will wipe all the iRules you might have been working on locally and refresh them all. There is a "reset" right click menu option on an iRule by iRule basis but that will only reset it to the original value from the last refresh, not from the latest value on the server. I could add a single menu option here for "refresh" that will pull just that iRule down from the server if you think that would be valuable.

     

     

    I'm not sure about checking for stale iRules. What time interval do I choose? 2 minutes? 5 minutes? 30 minutes? Whatever you pick, if you are working in a multi-user scenario, then there's the odds that you could overwrite each other regardless of the interval they are checked.

     

     

    -Joe

     

  • What about recording the bigip.conf timestamp each time the iRuler loads the rules and then comparing that to the file timestamp as a save is attempted? If the timestamp has changed, then prompt the user or do a diff (or something else?)?

     

     

    Aaron
  • That would require file system access of some sort and I was trying to avoid including 3rd party ssh libraries in the Editor distribution. Not sure how to get the timestamps otherwise. If you have an idea, I'm all ears!

     

     

    -Joe