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mnowina_63180's avatar
mnowina_63180
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Jun 04, 2008

Active Connection Tracking

Hi,

 

 

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a way to uniquely identify active sessions so that we can act on individual sessions at a particular time. I know people have used cookies in the past, but I'm looking for a way to apply this to RTSP clients.

 

 

For example, after the RTSP connection has been established and RTP packets are being sent to the client when a specified time barrier has passed then drop the connection.

 

 

Thanks,

 

 

Matt
application delivery
dev
devops
iRules
  • hoolio's avatar
    hoolio
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Jun 05, 2008
    Hello,

     

     

    I don't have any experience with RTSP, but looking through RFC2326 (Click here) and this page (Click here), it seems like the RTSP session token is sent to the client after initial creation in an RTSP response header. You should be able to parse the session token from a response and either increment a global session counter, or add it to the BIG-IP session table. When you see a close event in the RTSP request or response, you could clear the session details from the BIG-IP. You can use the RTSP:: (Click here) and session (Click here) commands to implement this.

     

     

    Aaron
  • mnowina_63180's avatar
    mnowina_63180
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 06, 2008
    Hi Aaron,

     

     

    Thanks for the suggestion. I've been playing with the RTSP_REQUEST event and I can perform different actions during these types of client to server events, however what I'm really looking for is something that will allow me to interact with a specific session outside of these events. So as you pointed out there are several initial RTSP steps in setting up a connection "OPTIONS, DESCRIBE, SETUP & PLAY" then after this point its basically RTP packets (either TCP or UDP) that flow back to the client with the data payload. What I'm wondering is whether there's a way, during the RTP portion of the flow, to uniquely identify the session.

     

     

    During RTSP_REQUEST or CLIENT_ACCEPTED, I thought about about assigning a session variable that could be read during SERVER_CONNECTED or SERVER_DATA, but I wasn't sure how effective (or ineffective) this means of tracking would be. I also thought about using source IP and port as another way to identify the session, but thought/hoped there would be an easier way. If you take RTSP out of the equation and just think about established connections, is there a way to interact with the LTMs session tracking table? I assume this is what is updating the stats page when you look at a particular pool.

     

     

    Matt