Forum Discussion
Dick_Piccard_72
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusProgrammatic Maintenance of a large data group
We are running BIG-IP 10.1.0. We have a situation that could be addressed with two large data groups (each likely to have about a thousand lines, but we need a method that will scale gracefully up to 33,000 total lines in the two groups -- one for every student, faculty member, or other employee). Even if the average time between changes for any given person's line were five years, that would mean 25 changes per business day, and many of those would happen as students arrived each September and left each June. The web administration GUI interface could be used to update the two data groups, but the people who can be trusted to use the GUI have other work to do, too. Therefore, we want to establish a self-service application, running on the F5 or on another server, that would drive the two data groups. Updates must be accepted at any time, but need not be effective until a daily job that ran in the early-AM. The GUI must continue to work for routine updates of the other data groups and iRules, etc., but could be disabled temporarily during the daily job.
I have not been able to discover any indication that bigip.conf can contain "include" directives pointing at files that we would update (e.g., by SFTP).
All suggestions welcome!
- You'll likely want to create an external data group that is stored in a file on the file system (Look for the "type" field when creating a data group in the GUI). You can then use iControl to upload the files and ping the LTM to reload it into the current virtual servers configuration cache. You could also scp the file up if that works out better for you but you'll need to modify the external data groups configuration to trigger a reload by the LTM.
Hope this helps...
-Joe 
hoolioCirrostratus
Hi Dick,
I think an iControl based application would be well suited for administering the datagroup(s). This would allow you to create a web (or other) type of application that would connect to the LTM via HTTPS and add/remote/edit datagroup entries. You could build whatever business logic into the app and then use iControl calls to implement it. The relevant portion of the iControl API is described on the wiki:
http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iControl/LocalLB__Class.html
Aaron
Dick_Piccard_72
Joe and Aaron,
Thanks for the quick and informative responses. That will likely keep us "off the streets and out of trouble" for a while!
