The F5 Guy

I recently had the opportunity to create a few custom BIG-IP health monitors for use in monitoring web sites hosted on a SharePoint 2010 farm.  The default HTTP monitor could not be used because as it is configured the sites require you to log in via NTLM.

Not having a default monitor to turn to in this situation and having only tinkered with external monitors before, I began searching around for a way to setup an external monitor that could log on to the SharePoint sites to perform the health check.  Naturally I turned to DevCentral and did a little digging around on the forums.   That is where I found a wonderful post by stp1978 that laid out the basics of what I needed to do.

Read More >>

To use an iRule or to NOT use an iRule?  It seems like a simple question when first asked doesn’t it?  Yet when you reflect upon what you are really saying when you answer that question, you will realize a lot of thought should go into the answer.

TMOS is gaining a wealth of new functionality with each release and word of what you can achieve through using iRules is spreading even to those unfamiliar with the BIG-IP product line.  I have personally seen this discussion pop up more than once and we even grappled with it at the MVP Summit in Chicago. 

Read More >>

I have had the pleasure and honor of attending the DevCentral MVP Summit that was held in Chicago over the last few days and I am just blown away at how awesome it was.  Even the picture on the right doesn’t do it justice!

Whew!

The folks over at F5 Networks did an amazing job of putting together an outstanding series of events and the DevCentral folks put together one heck of a summit for all of us MVP’s.  I had such an outstanding time I want to extend my thanks to all of you involved and to all of my fellow MVP members.

Read More >>

Time and time again I am amazed at how powerful and flexible iRules can be. I have seen a few posts on DevCentral requesting help with creating iRules that rewrite or redirect traffic without updating the clients browser and I thought it might be fun to provide a few examples of how to do this.

One way to do this is called transparent header modification. How it works is a user will enter a URL in their browser such as “www.mycompany.com/bus/”, the request will come in to your BIG-IP and the information sent to your web servers can be redirected or rewritten to whatever you like. Here is an example:

Read More >>

I setup Live Meeting Portal Server in a production environment the other day and wanted to share a few things that are not mentioned in Microsoft’s documentation.  The BIG-IP portion of this configuration is super easy, but it is understanding how both the application and the BIG-IP work together that can be the hardest part of any deployment.

Setting Up BIG-IP and Live Meeting Portal Server

Read More >>