Forum Discussion
Hamish
Cirrocumulus
CirrocumulusRULE_INIT not firing
Has anyone else ever had problems with RULE_INIT not firing for some iRules?
I have a 10.1.0 6400 and when editing an iRule with the iRule editor, I get an error from mcpd on sa...
Posted By Hamish on 01/14/2010 4:55 AM
Anyway... What I've found is that if you ever get a TCL error in RULE_INIT, then RULE_INIT event won't fire again, until you delete and re-create the iRule. Even on a 'b load' it won't fire.
Yes, this is CR133851. The workaround for this CR is to make "after 1" be the first command in RULE_INIT. This is specifically a workaround for that CR, and should not be considered a "best practice". It won't make things start working if they're in a non-working state, but it will prevent them from breaking again. You could, as you found, delete the rule and recreate it.
A closely related issue that several customers have also run into is that sometimes iRules get processed before classes which can lead to RULE_INIT failure (this is CR132122). This can happen when tmm gets restarted but mcpd does not. This fix is already in our next release, and will eventually be in 10.0.1 and 10.1.0 rollup hotfixes.
The big mess happens when you run into the second CR, which causes the problem, and then the first CR, which means you can't easily fix it. These CRs only seem to be happening on v10.x systems, although the code has been the same for a very long time, so they should affect other versions in theory.