Forum Discussion
A request from our core developers at DevCentral to our customers [long]
Hi folks,
Devcentral is a resource that we developers on v9 love to participate in. It gives us the ability to show off our baby - something we've worked hard on for years (literally). We're also hoping to talk with people who are as stoked about our product as we are, and frankly we're also hoping to see you use iRules for things we'd never expected them to be used for. (Personally, a highlight for me is when I speak with someone and they tell me that they're using a feature I wrote to do "X", and I step back and consider the fact that I never intended it for that!)
Given our zeal in this forum for our product, it's all too easy to expect that we'll be able to turn around questions on its use and configuration quickly. While this sometimes may be the case, please understand that we're hard at work for you developing enhancements, designing features, and (dare I say it) fixing bugs. We understand that our users are our product's life-blood, and if you have issues with something we've written, we'll often drop everything and work on it. However, for non-iRules related issues posted in this forum we're working blind, since support and services provide our eyes and ears. (Also, they're not as anti-social as us kernel-hacker types!)
If you have questions regarding the setup and configuration of our product, or a bug report, please please please contact support. They're trained to deal with such issues, and your case will always be their priority. (With developers, we're answering forum postings from home, on our breaks, and after hallway conversations.) Notify your sales representative or support management if you find a problem with the support system. Bug reports and requests for information do get to us if our support department doesn't have a solution to the problem. In fact, you may find that support can answer questions pertaining to known issues better than we can, since they deal with every customer and can track trends across our customer base, while we get the escalations they need our intervention for.
This forum is not a substitute for our support infrastructure. Of course, we'll always try and help as much as we can here, but please don't be upset with us if we refer you to support on certain issues.
With warm regards,
A BIG-IP core developer.
31 Replies
zak_thompson_86Nimbostratus
Honestly the one thing F5 is lacking is support for iRules. Cisco will help you write your rules/acls for their ACE modules. Zeus/ZXTM will help you with your trafficscripts for free. And then theres F5 that sends everyone to the devecntral area. I will admit its a nice area with resources. But if i need a rule to do somthing and I needed it yesterday I don't have time to post on a forum and hope/pray someone can come along and help. I see far too many posts go unanswered and i'm sure the submitter is on the other end bashing their head in.- First of all, no one is expecting you to hope or pray that your issue will be seen on DevCentral. I personally, along with the rest of the DC staff, get an email every time anyone posts to any of the forums. We do the best we can in getting to respond to all of these many posts across many topics in a timely manner. There are very, very few posts that "go unanswered", especially in the iRules area, so I'm not sure where it is you got the impression that so many people were left unassisted.
Second, if it's an SLA you want, F5 does offer a consulting service that would be glad to assist with your iRules development in an agreed upon time frame.
Give it a chance before you knock it. I'm willing to bet that the community comes through in your time of need, whether it's one of us at F5 or one of the many active posters we have in the community that is NOT an F5 employee, which is something that no one else can offer. This forum isn't just watched by a few 8-5 folks here at F5. It's watched by an entire, 20,000+ member community that's involved and interested in these technologies. To me, that's something pretty special.
Colin - JRahm
Admin
I second that, Colin.
The wiki and the forums are so robust with detailed examples that I'd guess at least 80% of the questions asked these days are already available in the threads.
Every vendor has their strengths and weaknesses. Cisco has always been a documentation machine, but rarely an innovator. F5 was weak on the documentation early but has made great strides in the documentation department in the last few years, and has always been an innovator. 
nit1987_51727good
nit8080_109161test
lava_kafle_5506I am a newbie. i love the device and this forum.
I have hosted the device as https://192.168.0.2
i have two application Pool Members http://192.168.1.3
and http://192.168.2.14
I want the device to round robin incoming connections,
and when one of the member 1.3 is down automatically persist and transfer the session to remaining node 2.14.
It is not happening. Please help me with iRules or any settings I can make in the device.
hoolioCirrostratus
Hi lkafle,
Welcome to DC. Can you create a new post for your question?
I believe there is a codeshare example which meets your requirements:
Single Node Persistence
http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iRules/SingleNodePersistence.html
Thanks,
Aaron- Shay_Ben-David1Men, you got it all wrong, i don't use the tech support much, but from time to time when i asked some help they were assisting me professionally. Devcentral is all other purposes then tech support, and if you gonna look on the TIMOS progress during the years, F5 add more features to the configuration tools that were only can be done by iRules in order to allow users to overcome the iRule fear.
good luck 
Mark_Melin_6298haha... you F5 folks need to stop defending yourselves, its makes you sound, well, a little guilty. the fact remains, you're offering a 'powerful tool' that no one knows how to use, and you dont offer any instruction or well formed documentation in iRules at all. i spend around 4K for an F5 bootcamp and i learned a few cool things regarding iRules and TCL syntax, but what I'm trying to do is beyond what my F5 Sales Engineers know how to do at this point so I'm not expecting answers from you guys anymore. its like asking Ronald McDonald for a good hamburger.
Example: Click here
link: http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=31&postid=23963&view=topic
I did get hyperlinks from peers, but thats it. I cobbled together a lot of code, logged a lot of results, looked at a lot of tcpdumps and now im 'proficient'. I've solved my problem... just need to reconcile some fault tolerance and performance tuning.- hoolioI'm not sure what your point is, mmelin@speakeasy.net. It sounds like you're frustrated with what you've been able to get in documentation and help with iRules. Your approach is not the best for getting anything accomplished though.
I looked through the forums for your posts and saw one question from you. I think Denny and I gave valid tips based on the information you'd provided. Perhaps we could have given better suggestions if we had a clearer understanding of what you were trying to do. With the exception of a few people whose primary job is working on DevCentral, no one here professes to be an expert in iRules. Considering the number of protocols and applications that people use iRules for, I don't expect anyone to have an expert answer for all scenarios. If you want a guaranteed custom solution, pay for it. F5 sells this through their consulting group.
If you want best effort help and suggestions from other users, F5 employees and Developers, come to DevCentral. But sniping comments like you've posted aren't what will encourage anyone to help you. As a standard disclaimer, I don't work for F5 and I'm not defending them. I'm just trying to give you some background on the situation and let you know that your comment is juvenile and insulting. The general level of conduct on this forum has been very professional. As a user of the forum, I'd ask you to try to maintain that if you continue to post here.
Aaron
