Employee
Employee
Welcome and congratulations on being the first non-F5'er to contribute to our federal DC forum!
To answer your questions:
1. Have you set a date or a location yet [for the next Federal user's group]?
A: Sort of and yes. We're looking at late May or early June for the event, and having it at the Washington Manor Golf Club in Urbana, Maryland.
Worthington Manor Golf Club
8329 Fingerboard Road
Urbana, Maryland 21704
301-874-5400
It starts with a few presentations on upcoming technologies, and ends with some great golfing action! The official invitation will be posted soon.
2. A couple of items I would like to see:
HSPD-12 authentication to F5 devices Is there a way or a plan?
Securing the F5 devices based on Federal/DoD security.
A: HSPD-12 is the directive that drives FIPS 201. FIPS 201 then drives the actual technical directives issued by the various services and agencies. For the DoD it's JTF-GNO Communications Tasking Orders (CTO). For Fed it's something else. In the grand scheme you have things like the Federal Bridge which is a PKI model that is supposed to allow for interoperability between services and PKIs, and some inter-agency directives for cross-communication. As you probably know, F5 has a really rich set of authentication capabilities, including Kerberos, OCSP/CRLDP, AD/LDAP, OAM, etc. Throw in iRules that can, as if by magic, tie all of these crazy things together, and you have an unbelievably powerful and flexible model for pretty much anything you can imagine (think SAML, SOAP/Web Services, single sign-on). You get the picture. And because you're doing all of this with BIG-IP, you have the added benefit of enhanced security (proxy security, denial-of-service security, application layer security).
I hope that answers your questions.
See you at the FedFUG?
Kevin