External HTTP monitor for Citrix XML Broker

In Deployment Guide "Deploying the BIG-IP LTM v10 with Citrix Presentation Server 4.5"(version1.1) there is an example about how to monitor XML Broker. Basically, It's an HTTP monitor doing a POST of some xml data querying for a published application. But this monitor don't work (for version prior to 10.2.x) due to the issue described in SOL1033( Configuring an HTTP application health monitor to send a POST request): "the bigd process automatically appends one or two CR/LF sequences to the end of the monitor Send string".

An HTTP monitor created as described in the deployment guide leads to an HTTP 400 Bad Request.

The solution: an external monitor doing the same thing with curl. For this I used the script in

http://devcentral.f5.com/Wiki/default.aspx/AdvDesignConfig/HTTPMonitor_cURL_BasicGET.html

with the following customization for XML Broker:

curl -fNs -H "Connection: close" -H "Content-type: text/xml" http://${NODE}:${PORT}${URI} -d "@/usr/bin/monitors/test" | grep -i "$

The XML data is in the file /usr/bin/monitor/test:

no-load-bias

TEST_APPLICATION

"TEST_APPLICATION" is the application published by the Broker.

The variable $URI is specified in the external monitor definition: URI = /scripts/wpnbr.dll

The Recive string I check for is also specified in the external monitor definition: RECV = IMAHostId

This issue seems to be solved in version 10.2.x (SOL10655: Change in Behavior: CR/LF characters appended to the HTTP monitor Send string), but I haven't test it yet.

Hope that helps.