The F5 Guy

Like a lot folks around the country I pre-ordered a 32 GIG iPad a few weeks ago and have been waiting eagerly to check out the new device.  I already have two Apple branded products in the house, so it was easy for me to drink the Kool-Aid and purchase another .

However, I was very disappointed with Apple on the day that I finally received my iPad.  I had updated my MacBook the night before and ensured it was ready to go, only to have my hard drive crash moments before I was able to sync up my new iPad!  There I was sitting in my cubicle at work shaking my fists in the air and screaming “NOooooo!!!!” In my mind anyways…

Well all was not lost and I do mean that literally.  I had my data backed up, but I did have to send the MacBook in for repair.  Thankfully I was still covered under my Apple Care plan.  As it turns out, I also received a new logic board, heat pipe assembly and top case replacement.  Evidently the now three year old MacBook had more wrong with it than I had guessed.

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I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Seattle for some ASM TMOS version 10.1 training hosted by f5 Networks.  I can summarize this entire post simply by saying, the training is awesome.  I felt it was the perfect mix of instruction and hands-on material.  I have been to many different kinds of training classes and I hate walking away from a training session feeling like I didn’t learn a thing.  That is definitely not the case here.  I learned a ton.

Before I came to the class I could build a security policy and assign it to a website and do some minor tweaking.  Now I can say with confidence that I can build a web application security policy that is PCI compliant and has a solid foundation.

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I was initially going to title this blog entry “f5 Networks – MVP Goodies”.  Then I thought “f5 Networks – MVP Spoils of War” would be a good title because the PS3 title “God Of War III” is coming out on the 16th  and I thought I would at least work in the word “War” somewhere.  Then I thought, how about f5 Networks – The Box of Awesomeness?  I know it sounds a little goofy, but IT DOES EXIST!!!  Who new naming a blog entry could be so difficult?!

Now that the naming of the entry has been completed, on to the main topic!  I received said box from FedEX this last Friday from f5 Networks and I felt compelled to write a blog post about it and include some pics for your viewing enjoyment.

I can’t tell you how much I have already enjoyed being a member of the f5 Networks MVP program.  It has been awesome from day one and I look forward to contributing more to the community now that f5 Networks has so graciously supplied all of us f5 MVP’s with the tools to do just that.  Thank you for the great gear and thank you for supporting the community like you do!

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I recently had the pleasure of working on a Citrix 5.0 implementation and I wanted to share a few things that I learned during that setup.  As many of you know, there are two deployment guides that have been made available by F5 Networks in regards to setting up Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 in TMOS versions 9.x and 10.x.  They are excellent guides and the best thing about them is that you can utilize those guides to assist you in deploying Citrix XenApp 5.0, with a few exceptions of course.  Those exceptions are what I will be covering in this tech tip.

Both of the previously mentioned deployment guides discuss editing files on the Citrix farms Web Interface servers so that it looks for the client IP address in the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header.  Otherwise, every connection will appear to be originating from the BIG-IP LTM and not from its true IP.  After reading both guides and looking at my current environment I was dismayed to find that the files and locations mentioned were no longer valid.  I then turned to my top three resources on the web in the search for an answer: AskF5, DevCentral and Google.

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I learned an interesting thing about the Config Sync process the other day and I wanted to share the story with others in the community.  I was on a BIG-IP 6400 unit that was the Active unit in an Active/Standby pair, just doing some pre-spring cleaning (I bet there are some Network Support Engineers shaking their head right about now) and decided I needed to clear out all of the old expired SSL certificates out of the certificate store on the unit.

No problem, I identified all of the expired certificates, checked the box beside them and hit the delete button at the bottom of the page.  After verifying everything was still happy and the support tickets didn’t start flooding my inbox I decided to run a config sync and push the config changes over to the standby box.

The config sync ran without a problem and the gui showed Config Sync: OK.  I then proceeded to check my changes on the standby unit, just for verification purposes.  And that ladies and gentlemen, is when the fun began….

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