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Keith_Richards_'s avatar
Keith_Richards_
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 05, 2007

host name based management

We have a number of complex test environments that stage from dev through to production. Each environment has LTMs that are all running (theoretically) the same configuration but with different IP addresses in pools, Virtual Servers, iRules etc. The key point is that the hosts in each environment have the same names.

Has anyone managed the configuration in such a large environment by maintaining the bigip.conf file manually with host names and uploading the same bigip.conf file to each LTM with any updates? The /etc/hosts file for the LTM in each test environment is unique to that environment.

I have done a couple of small tests and putting names into bigip.conf directly and then running 


b load bigip.conf

works fine - the GUI resolves the names into IP addresses but the bigip.conf file remains with hostnames.

I noticed a strange thing that if you create through the GUI using hostnames they are resolved at that point to IP addresses which then get written to bigip.conf.

any help gratefully received.

cheers, Keith
management
monitoring

1 Reply

  • Deb_Allen_18's avatar
    Deb_Allen_18
    Historic F5 Account
    Sep 14, 2007
    Hi Keith--

     

     

    No lookups are performed @ load time.

     

     

    The GUI performs the name lookup for you and inserts the response into the config file when the pool is created or the new member added. (Lookup uses the local LTM hosts file or resolver, not the browser's.)

     

     

    That gives you the ability to enter hostnames rather than IPs while still creating a configuration file that is ready to load.

     

     

    Which is a Very Good Thing: It prevents a local DNS outage from disabling your entire configuration. And imagine how long it would take to load a config with hundreds of servers, each of which requires a lookup... esp since the config has to load on failover.

     

     

    HTH

     

    /deb