A Catch from the Codeshare: Connection Lists

On the side of the road in northern Missouri just north of Mark Twain’s stomping grounds, there is a slice of hillside removed just to the side of the highway. In Arkansas, there’s a nondescript field tucked away in a state park. Short of word of mouth and this thing they call the internet, you wouldn’t be any the wiser that buried or surfaced in these two locations are an amazing variety of geodes and diamonds, respectively. In this article series I will explore recent and well-aged gems from the codeshare, highlighting inventive solutions contributed by you, the community. Please join me on this great adventure as we oscillate on the Mohs’ scale of codeshare geekery.

Connection Lists via iControl REST

Community member and fellow St. Louisan Jason Cohen snuck this baby in during the dark offices time between Christmas and New Years. It deserves to see the light of day! We get a lot of questions on the site on how to get connection data out of the BIG-IP. This is tricky, as using the management interface to download connection data where that data set might be very very large  can compromise system resources. Thankfully, Jason wisely includes a filter requirement in this script. After the initial requirement you can add as many filter properties as you like and the values to those properties you wish to match. You can also specify the output to be raw, json, or excel, which is very handy indeed. Here’s an example run on my laptop’s BIG-IP with the raw format:

FLD-ML-RAHM:downloads rahm$ python cl.py -r -f protocol=tcp admin@172.16.44.15
Password:
Sys::Connections
172.16.15.6:47200    208.87.139.148:443  172.16.15.6:47200    208.87.139.148:443  tcp  22  (tmm: 1)  none
192.168.102.1:63857  192.168.102.62:80   192.168.103.6:63857  192.168.103.50:80   tcp  5   (tmm: 1)  none
192.168.102.1:63828  192.168.102.62:80  192.168.103.6:63828  192.168.103.50:80  tcp  7  (tmm: 0)  none
192.168.102.1:63855  192.168.102.62:80  192.168.103.6:63855  192.168.103.50:80  tcp  5  (tmm: 1)  none
192.168.102.1:63837  192.168.102.62:80  192.168.103.6:63837  192.168.103.50:80  tcp  6  (tmm: 1)  none
192.168.102.1:63851  192.168.102.62:80  192.168.103.6:63851  192.168.103.50:80  tcp  6  (tmm: 1)  none
Total records returned: 6

This script is written in python and supported in 2.x and 3.x branches. Developed against BIG-IP version 11.6. I did have an issue with the json and excel export on my 12.0 image, so I’ll debug that later and provide a patch, however the raw works great.

Thank you Jason for this excellent catch from the codeshare!