Finding which pair of bigips I should query

"Hi,

 

 

I'm working on an application where you can input a IP or hostname and I would like it to look on all of our bigip pairs to find it and display the info about it. I would like to do this the non brute force way.

 

 

1. Ping the IP. Get the mac address. This would also get active one, since I don't shift the mac on failure.

 

2. Look up in a table of all of the mac addresses known to me.

 

3. Select the appropriate bigip and query everything about this IP.

 

 

The first part I'm at a loss on how to do this with java.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Tim"

 

 

 

First off, it's not clear what IP/hostname you're talking about. Are you interested in the address of the bigip or addresses "behind" the bigip? Secondly, if you already have a table of mac addresses, it's not clear why you're querying it. Finally, I'm kinda baffled why you need to mess with MACs at all because if you really want to talk to the active bigip, you just talk to the appropriate floating IP address.

 

 

In any case, I'm not a Java guy but I'd expect you can do one of a coupla things to get the hardware address:

 

 

1) shell out to ping and then read the arp table -- easy (assumption: java has trivial access to the equivalent of something like popen or system).

 

2) write some native code accessing the NIC directly and do your own arp request and response handlers -- harder than option 1, *very* platform specific, but you'll have better error-handling than you would in option 1.