For more information regarding the security incident at F5, the actions we are taking to address it, and our ongoing efforts to protect our customers, click here.

Forum Discussion

Velhoon_96037's avatar
Velhoon_96037
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Oct 30, 2007

Deployment Guide for Blackboard and BigIP LTM?

Since I had such luck with my first posting, I'll try again. Is there a deployment guide for using Blackboard v7 on IIS6 with F5 LTM? Blackboards "selective" SSL settings are giving me fits. I'm w...
education
microsoft
partner
dlegate_23320's avatar
dlegate_23320
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Feb 26, 2014

Sigh... looks like Nick's document is now password protected? I know it's probably outdated, but still, would be nice to see for reference.

 

I just recently opened a ticket with Blackboard asking about Firefox 27 opening thousands of connections suddenly and since our homepage with Community creates a session for each "user" and these (presumably prefetch) connections don't store cookies, each connection gets its own session, killing our database performance if it lasts more than 10-20 minutes.

 

Blackboard sent me their NetScaler scripts used in Managed Hosting. I don't know if anyone at DevCentral would be able to look at those and "translate" them to F5 iRules, but they seem to be tried-and-true since managed hosting currently hosts about 60% of Blackboard customers.

 

Here's then information in the ticket:

 

[---- begin ticket response ----

 

For the, Limit Selector- "Each selectlet is a non-compound advanced expression, and is a "AND" relationship with others". For the "Limit Identifier, 'the threshold is set to a value of "2" to allow double click on a link. Default value for time slice is 1000ms(1s), it is enough for a normal browse operation. Means at most click a URL twice within one second.'

 

These are example URIs being excluded:

 

  • /
  • /bbcswebdav/pid-2578707-dt-content-rid-6462928_1/xid-6462928_1
  • /webapps/login?new_loc=%2Fmodules%2F_142_1%2Fearh.jpg
  • /webapps/login/
  • /bbcswebdav/pid-394082-dt-content-rid-1439038_1/courses/10046.201305.XLIST/section6_3%20Filled.pdf
  • /webapps/blackboard/content/FirstFrame.png
  • /webapps/vtbe-tinymce/tiny_mce/plugins/spellchecker/css/content.css
  • /webapps/sen-coursesplus-bb_bb60//images/empty.gif
  • /webapps/sen-coursesplus-bb_bb60//images/announcement.png
  • /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png
  • /sessions/5/1/8/4/6/9/3/session/gradebook_20130510910.201305_Assignment20_5_2013-06-15-08-20-10.zip
  • /@@/CFAA8BD48A1E2FD9DD2E9C1DF26412C5/courses/1/MHRC433-A335_2137_DD/db/_23966706_1/MHRC%202.2.mov

Some of these are standard others not, of course those that are non-standard had to be identified through analysis.

 

---- end ticket response ----]

 

If anyone knows how to translate NetScaler scripting to F5, I'd be happy to send the actual script as well.

 

Dan