Forum Discussion

Leo_T_144084's avatar
Leo_T_144084
Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
Aug 06, 2014

Maintenance page iRule. Need redirect AND rewrite.

Hi :)   I am looking to create an irule to throw a maintenance page redirect if our entire pool is down. This is what I have, which works.   when HTTP_REQUEST { Check if the VS default po...
application delivery
availability
devops
iRules
LTM
management
  • Leo_T_144084's avatar
    Leo_T_144084
    Aug 22, 2014

    OK, this is what i did which did the trick:

    Added the maintenance server as a node on the LTM Create a pool called maintenance_pool and added my maintenance page server to it. Created an irule called maintenace_page with the following in it:

    when HTTP_REQUEST {
    if {[active_members [LB::server pool]] < 1 }  {
        pool maintenance_pool
    }
 }

    Applied the rule to the Virtual servers needed. Voila. Works like a charm!

    I really did not want to host the maintenance page on the LTM as we often change those pages and it is easier for the DEVs to do it directly on the server itself.

    Thanks again for your help OTS02.

OTS02's avatar
OTS02
Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
Aug 08, 2014

The LTM can serve out a good looking page (with images) from an iRule. It does take some doing though. You have to encode the images in base64 and load them into a class file. Here is a good link to some work that nitass has done: https://devcentral.f5.com/questions/maintenance-page

 

You will, of course, need to add some logic to keep an eye on the www.xyz.com pool. If you simply change the host header, after serving the maintenance page, you will create a race condition that will probably be terminated by the LTM.