The F5 Guy

I am having to venture away from F5 BIG-IP news on this one folks.  I have recently been working a lot on Microsoft Direct Access and I came across an issue that I wanted to highlight for all those bashing their heads against a brick wall trying to come up with a fix.

NRPT – Name Resolution Policy Table.  If you have messed around with Direct Access much at all you have to had come across this term at some point.  It basically tells your Direct Access clients how to behave when it comes to DNS queries.  Think host file on steroids…

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It is amazing how quickly a month can go by isn’t it?  I guess it helps that I spent a week of that in Cozumel Mexico!  My wife and I were fortunate enough to obtain our SCUBA Diver certifications on this last trip so we are both pretty stoked about that.  But enough about me, lets talk a little about BIG-IP TMOS version 10.2.  I have had the opportunity to load this up onto a production box recently and I thought I would share a quick post regarding the WebAccelerator Module.

I have used the WAM (WebAccelerator Module) to accelerate a few SharePoint 2007 sites in the past and have been able to achieve a 45%-55% reduction in the number of hits on our web front end servers.  To me that is a pretty dramatic reduction to say the least.  Those servers have since been upgraded to SharePoint 2010 so I will hopefully be doing another blog post in a few weeks where I will show you how we use WAM to accelerate SharePoint 2010 web applications.  In this post I am going to cover using the default WAM IIS template to accelerate our main web site and show you the results.

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Chetan Bhatt (aka The Bhattman over at DevCentral) is the author of the blog post below.  Thank you for your contributions to the community Chetan!

From time to time, I usually receive a request that goes something like this.

“I have a pair of F5 ADC in an Internet DMZ, where the servers behind the load balancer need to access NAS system(s) on a VLAN located in the same network on another VLAN that is not behind the load balancer.

The problem is that in my current design I have to route through the F5 Load balancer to access the NAS system(s).  Unfortunately the amount of bandwidth it takes supersedes the F5 ADC’s total throughput.  I would like to by pass this without adding extra network cards or recreating a new VLAN and would like preserve the IP addresses as much as possible.”

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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.

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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. 

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