DevCentral Top 5: Sep 22, 2014 [End of Life]

Here we are again...that fateful and glorious moment when we get to highlight the "best of the best" articles from DevCentral.  As you know, DevCentral produces more awesome content than any other community out there, so sit back, relax, grab that second cup of coffee, and enjoy these amazing articles.

You Want Action on a Threshold Violation? Use iCall!

You want action?  I want iCall!  Jason Rahm, the godfather of DevCentral, takes us on an amazing journey of event-based automation with the BIG-IP.  As Jason points out in his article, iCall has been around since the glory days of the 11.4 release, yet there seems to be a gap in the awareness of this functionality.  A DevCentral member posted a question about toggling interfaces if active pool members in a pool falls below 70% (or whatever percent you choose).  Jason used this as motivation to write an iCall script that defines the pools of interest, sets the total number of pool members, sets the available members, checks to see if 70% are available, and then enables/disables the interface based on the result.  Jason described each step of the process, and he also shared all the code so you can steal it and use it for yourself!

iHealth API Part 2 - An Introduction to REST

In his inaugural iHealth article, Jon Gross introduced us to the iHealth API and told us all about the awesome health-check features it includes.  Now, in his second article, Jon discusses the REST framework and how it provides a nice clean way of retrieving, modifying, and deleting things using HTTP.  Using REST, you can retrieve all sorts of iHealth-related information on your BIG-IP.  Jon even uses a goat analogy to make it easy for everyone to understand...get out there and read this one!

Under the hood of F5 BIG-IP LTM and Cisco ACI integration – Role of the device package

Faraz Siddiqui explains the integration between the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and F5 BIG-IP LTM.  One of the critical components for this integration is the F5 device package, which abstracts the L4-L7 service device in a way that allows the Cisco APIC to automate and provision a network service that attaches to the ACI fabric.  Faraz explains the concepts of service graphs, device packages, device scripts, and device package integration workflow with Cisco APIC.  We all know that F5 and Cisco are strategic partners, and this article highlights one of the many powerful results of this partnership.

The man in your browser

What?!?  There's a man in my browser??  Seriously, where do these people come from?  Lori MacVittie reminds us that, not only is there a man in your browser, it's not good that he's there.  Man In The Browser (MITB) is not a new technique, but it's still very dangerous and many instances of powerful Trojan Malware use this capability.  Trojans will steal credentials (say, to financial systems) using MITB to inject scripts into legitimate banking web applications.  These scripts are dangerous because they become part of the application logic. What's that?  You would never fall victim to one of these fake pop-up scripts?  Did you know that 73% of users are unable to distinguish between real and fake popup messages?  The key to detecting these script-injecting, app modifying monsters is to understand the state of the web application page at the time it's delivered - before the Trojan has a chance to modify it - as well as monitoring for duplicate communication initiated from the web page.  Our F5 Security Operations Center (SOC) team has some fantastic analysis of this type of malware...check out all the great things they are doing!

2 Minute Tech Tip: URL Redirects

So we started this new video series on DevCentral...it's called "2 minute tech tips."  The idea is that, normally, no one has the time to sit through a 30 minute video broadcast to learn all about the greatness of F5 technology.  Why not break it into manageable chunks and deliver it 2 minutes at a time?  Brilliant, you say?  That's exactly what we thought!  In this edition of 2 minute tech tips, you can learn how to do URL redirects using BIG-IP Local Traffic Policies.  Many people use iRules to redirect URLs, but you can use the built-in functionality of the BIG-IP to do this.  iRules are awesome and flexible, but it's always faster and more efficient to use built-in functionality whenever you can.  Enjoy the video, and be on the lookout for more 2 minute tech tips in the future!