A request from our core developers at DevCentral to our customers [long]

Well said Aaron. As a general comment for posters who are frustrated with iRules because of the same type of reasons mmelin@speakeasy.net posted, please keep in mind that iRule is new compared to any other scripting language and also it's specific to F5 which means it has a significant less development base then say other languages. So please re-evaluate your expectations of this forum. That being said this forum is collaboration by F5 and Non-F5 developers, analysts, etc. - People helping other people for free – sometimes on the weekends. I am not a F5 person and this only represents 2% of my job, but I am grateful that there is a forum that someone is helping me for free even if it is a link to someplace else. I cannot count how many times someone sent me a link that helped me think of a new solution, even if it never answered my question. I think anyone who wants to respond the way mmelin@speakeasy.net did should probably think a little harder, not make assumptions, and remember that people (human beings ;-) ) are their trying to help - so do not bite the hand that is extended to help you. Simply say "that didn't answer my question or help me....but thank you for trying your best" It's more proffesional and courteous.

 

 

My 2 cents,

 

CB

 

Hey Mark,

 

 

I am an F5 employee, specifically one assigned full time to DevCentral, so interpret that as you will in the context of this response.

 

 

All of us on the DevCentral team are dedicated to getting answers to questions out here, and much of F5 lends a hand. But we do have a policy that if the community is resolving your issues, we let them - these gentlemen are doing what you do every day, it gives them the perspective to help you, and saves our time for writing articles, etc to help you maximize your use of the BIG-IP. They are the equivalent of what military strategists call a "force multiplier", able to help you on most topics as well or better than us, and they make the team look a lot bigger than it actually is. So "links from your peers" may well be the best answers you could get, and we're grateful to the crowd that helps you out just because they can.

 

 

With that said, we are aware of some of the things that appear to have frustrated you, and are addressing them. Deb Allen, a team-member of mine, with an astounding amount of help from the community, is fleshing out the Wikis so that they are more complete. This being the primary iRules documentation, we feel this is an important job, and are glad it's in Deb's capable hands and there are people willing to help her. We've also set up a system that gives SEs and SAs more peers to access when trying to resolve a problem they're stumped on. Note when I say "we", I refer generically to F5. I am pleased to see these things happening, but I didn't have a hand in arranging them in any way. Finally, we're working up short tutorial sessions that will go in order to help get new users up to speed - with both video and text portions to help facilitate knowledge acquisition.

 

 

The point of this thread appears to have been the developers thanking the customers and saying that they're watching DC and will help as they can. Considering that their role is not to support DevCentral but to continue to produce the excellent products that make F5 great, that's a commitment they didn't have to make. We're glad they're willing to help out.

 

 

So we're taking steps to relieve the problems you struggled with - steps that are largely complete - and we've got a great community of people helping out. So I can see why the negative reaction to your post. Bear with us, we were the first ones to do this, so speed bumps were inevitable. As we continue to stretch the boundaries, we'll certainly hit some more. But we really do understand that the customers are what's important. We hope that you've resolved your issues, but if not, feel free to post back. Each of the DevCentral team-members' email addresses are available on this site, feel free to write one of us if you're not getting help solving an iRules or iControl problem here on the forums.

 

 

Regards,

 

Don.

Hi there,

 

 

i startet with F5 a view months ago. I think it is a great product with good online help and lots of in Info. Also the community here is helpfull! Compared to Cisco, with what i deal the rest of my time i found it easy to start.

 

 

Greetings,

 

Ingo

 

 

I find this site very informative and very helpful! I do not feel comfortable calling F5 support for iRule questions, so this is a blessing to be able to research it on this forum.

 

 

Thank you so much! Keep up the good work.

 

 

Octavia

Thanks Octavia! Please do not hesitate to toss any questions you have our way and we'll do what we can to help you out.

 

 

-Joe

Whant to thank all developers and users of this site for great job.

 

I'm also not 100% happy with F5/iRules/support etc etc etc

 

but everytime before posting any issue here i make a deep search in DC, Google,

 

TCL reference, do a few captures in whireshark, and in 9 of 10 cases

 

i was able to solve the issue by myself.

 

 

regards,

 

Den

 

 

 

That's awesome to hear Den! Keep at it and definitely let us know if you have questions. The community loves to talk about this stuff so don't be shy, but it's always good to do your homework first like it sounds like you are. Nice one.

 

 

Colin

 

IMO, you guys are doing a great job. I started to do small things on our F5 after getting help from this forum.

 

 

I have been able to do the following with help:

 

1. Added a 'brownout' irule that helps us keep users with session logged in while preventing new traffic (we cant use cookies), when we have database issues which brings down our backend.

 

2. Using the irule editor code as a guide and help from the forum, created a tester for our production iRule which helps us test that any modifications/additions to the rule does not break existing business logic before it is deployed to production.

 

3. Added some limited logging to our main rule which allowed us to know about some of the errors which was not visible in our normal logging.

 

 

I am an application developer with no knowledge of iRules when I started out. Tinkering with F5 iRules is helping me improve my limited knowledge of networking.

 

 

To anyone who has a problem getting started off with iRules - get access to an F5 outside of your production environment and use the log command to experiment and learn.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Sriram

That's awesome news Sriram, thanks for the great comment! I'm very happy to hear you've been able to get up and running with some cool iRules and are enjoying it. As always if there's anything we can do to help or improve the DC experience , let us know.

 

 

Colin

Nothing but positive experiences working with F5 and I've been a very long time customer. Thanks for this forum guys!