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

Infinity05_1794's avatar
Infinity05_1794
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Feb 18, 2010

Help with scheduled reboots

We have some of our Windows servers that utilize F5 on a scheduled reboot. The problem is during the scripted reboots, we currently don't have any logic that integrates with F5 to cleanly failover from our primary to our DR site. This process obviously disrupts any active connections on that server.

 

 

I've been searching devcentral for a starting point on this project and was hoping for some direction. here's the flow that I would like to do, if it's possible:

 

 

Server1 is disabled at the node level in F5

 

server1 waits until all persistant connections and active connections have filtered over to DR

 

Server1 reboots

 

server1 is re-enabled at the node level in F5

 

 

 

We also need to make this work for a pool of servers:

 

server1 server2 server3 disabled...etc etc

 

 

Thanks for any help and direction!
management
monitoring

1 Reply

  • hoolio's avatar
    hoolio
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Feb 19, 2010
    Hi Ryan,

     

     

    The simplest option for this would be to configure a monitor that checks each server for a specific page and content within that page. When the server admins want to take a server down, they could change or remove the page being monitored, reboot the member, wait for the services to come up fully and then restore the monitor page. The downside to this approach is that when they change/rename the monitor page, all existing sessions will be broken.

     

     

    If you did want to do this with connections drained off gracefully, you could create a simple iControl-based script run from the pool member(s) themselves that disables the node, checks for no connections to the node, reboots, and then re-enables itself in the pool once it's services have come up. The mechanism for disabling a pool member should be fairly simple with iControl.

     

     

    There are a few related examples in the iControl Codeshare:

     

    http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iControl.CodeShare

     

     

    Aaron