iRule data group

Joe wrote an article on the File Transfer APIs that shows how to use the file upload/download APIs in the System.ConfigSync interface.

iControl 101 - 06 - File Transfer APIs

Updating a data group is relatively straight forward. The hard part I think is going to be the conversion process. There's no tool that I'm aware of to convert from Excel spreadsheet or flat XML file to data group format. Is it simply a single list of IP addresses, different lists of IP addresses, or is it a list of key-value pairs?

I don't think SNMP is the way to go. In lieu of iControl (probably the best way), you could partially automate the process by first uploading the flat list of IP addresses. Example:

10.70.0.1/32
10.70.0.2/32
10.70.0.3/32
10.70.0.4/32
10.70.0.5/32
10.70.0.6/32
10.70.0.7/32
10.70.0.8/32
10.70.0.9/32

And then processing this file with a simple Bash script:

!/bin/bash

data_group=dgimport_ip_list
import_file=iplist

 import the first line and replace everything in the data group
line=`head -1 $import_file`
tmsh modify ltm data-group internal $data_group records replace-all-with { $line }

 parse the rest of the file and add the data to the data group
sed 1d $import_file |while read line
do
    tmsh modify ltm data-group internal $data_group records add { $line }
done

Make sure the address-based data group has been created first.