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 wondering if I'll have to put certs on my webservers (nodes) as well as a cert on the F5 to get https that doesn't loop but gets balanced. Again, any help will be appreciated.

Velhoon, I've got a document that I've been working on. If you are still interested let me know. It involves some iRule stuff and a stream profile to work.

I'd definitely need some guidance on this.

Hi, We've been load balancing Blackboard with the BigIP for a while now. I've got a small blog that I don't update, but there are links to the PDF file that describes our setup in great detail. https://mysite.uky.edu/personal/njmccl0/Blog/default.aspx We have 6 app servers and 2 collab servers. Let me know if you have any questions at all.

I've seen a few cases now where this issue has come up and the deployment guide has not worked for these customers. All of these cases were using 9.4.x, so we were able to resolve the problem by removing the substitution iRule and just using a custom stream profile to change every instance of source "http://host.domain.edu" to target of "https://host.domain.edu". This keeps any correct external site links from being substituted, but will properly change all of the absolute URLs being used by Blackboard. The other key to this approach is to use rewrite redirect on the http virtual server and simply have all traffic destined to there be redirected to the https vip. This approach has worked every time. The only issue one customer had with this is that they had to adjust the way MS Office documents were being served on the back end server and he said it was very simple to change (didn't get the details on that). Hope this helps. Jeff

The iRule does something important that fixed several problems. If the stream profile is allowed to modify binary documents, then the internal checksum of the document will be off and be considered corrupt. If you have somebody that uploads a Word file that has a link in there that points to the http://server.edu then the stream profile will modify that, causing issues. We also had instances where Flash and other formats wouldn't work right in certain browsers.

Deployment Guide for Blackboard and BigIP LTM?

SP_38585
Historic F5 Account
Apr 12, 2012
I'm currently at a customer site but I will engage you when I can and we can chat about it.
AMS_88329
Nimbostratus
Apr 12, 2012
Awesome, thank you!
David_Papkin_24
Historic F5 Account
Apr 20, 2012
Hey SP,

Any experience about students being unable to submit their quizzes? Noted ramcache usage shot up to 100%. Have disabled WA to see if it helps.

Also, do you have any updated deployment guide, as previously mentioned?

Thanks

David Papkin
boneyard
MVP
Feb 28, 2013
is there an up to date guide around somewhere?
cwtang_18682
Nimbostratus
Sep 19, 2013
Thought to ask if anyone may have an updated copy of the deployment guide that may be shared?
JG
Cumulonimbus
Sep 19, 2013
If you have to use a stream profile to get the app to work, that means the app is not designed to work with F5 out-of-box. For us, it has worked well with SSL bridging. Don't use ramcache unless you know what you are doing, and do not use compression as there is currently an unresolved security issue with it.

We do have a http->https redirect set up as well.
Gavin_Connell-O
Nimbostratus
Sep 26, 2013
We load balance Blackboard with Big-IP 11.2.1 HF6, and we've had no real problems. We based our design around our previous Cisco Content Switch configuration, and Nick McClure's guide (thanks Nick!).

If anyone needs help with a particular aspect of the setup, let me know and we can collaborate.

Cheers - Gavin Connell-Otten Victoria University Wellington (NZ)
Gavin_Connell-O
Nimbostratus
Sep 26, 2013
Happy to share our design, but I may need to go through it and redact certain bits, just for confidentiality reasons :)
dlegate_23320
Nimbostratus
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
Gavin_Connell-O
Nimbostratus
Feb 26, 2014
Hi dlegate, I've got Nick's original integration doc in PDF. Send me your email address and I'll pass it over.

As for your increase of connections coming from firefox, I think we had a similar problem with chrome whereby the new tab preview page was polling all recently used pages whenever a user would open a new tab. It was creating a situation not dissimilar from what you describe. I'll double-check my records and post again soon.

Gavin