improved iControl authentication and running scripts locally

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