Forum Discussion

Keith_Richards_'s avatar
Keith_Richards_
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Jun 26, 2007

improved iControl authentication and running scripts locally

I wonder how everyone is authenticating connections to the iControl API? I have looked through the old posts and the only response I have seen shows that you basically have two options 1) get script to prompt for credentials at run-time, 2) store credentials in the script. Is there any way that client certificates could be used?

 

 

Another question is - has anyone written scripts, compiled them and then run them locally on the LTM itself? Is this even feasible?

 

 

And my last question... Has anyone written scripts on the LTM itself containing just bigpipe commands. I'm guessing you can't do *everything* through bigpipe, but thought I'd canvas opinion.

 

 

Thanks, Keith
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  • Joe_Pruitt's avatar
    Joe_Pruitt
    Jul 02, 2007
    Keith, currently the BIG-IP management interface (including the mangagement GUI) does not support client certificates as an authentication mechanism. If and when it does, we'll look into getting the iControl interfaces to work with it as well. But in the mean time, you are stuck with the WWW-Authentcate headers.

     

     

    As for running scripts on the BIG-IP, we don't recommend installing other software on the BIG-IP, and you'll have to check with support as to whether it will violate your service contract. With that said, all the modules are on the BIG-IP to SOAP::Lite with perl directly on the BIG-IP. I'd steer away from compiled code on the BIG-IP as I'm almost certain that that would violate your service contract (but check with support to make sure).

     

     

    For your last question, if you have shell access to the BIG-IP, then there is no reason why you can't create a shell script that wraps bigpipe commands. You are right that you can't do everything with bigpipe (ie user management, certificate stuff, etc) but it does do almost all of the LTM configuration (ie anything stored in bigip.conf and bigip_base.conf).

     

     

    -Joe