DevCentral Top5 12/10/2010
It’s Friday! Your work week is wrapping up (most of you, anyway) or perhaps it’s even over already, depending on your time zone. You’re looking forward to your weekend and trying to wrap up the last few loose ends at work to get yourself set up for a solid Monday. One of those things should be this week’s Top 5. With the 5 coolest things to grace DevCentral this week in hand, you can go spread the good word about how cool this stuff is to anyone that will listen. Well, that’s what I do, anyway. You do with it what you will, but here it is just the same:
Talking Microsoft Lync Server Availability and Scalability
This week we got to sit down, albeit some of us virtually, with part of the Microsoft team here at F5 and talk about Microsoft Lync Server. Honestly, we let them do most of the talking, which was good because they really knew their stuff. They talked about how to design deployments, how to ensure things are stable while scaling or optimally available despite the unexpected occurring, etc. Jeff’s blog post does a good job of detailing the conversations' bullet points as well as providing some links to follow to read more. The real reason it’s on the list though is that we recorded the live stream, complete with the F5 Microsoft folks taking questions from users via chat and answering them, and it was some good stuff. Take a peek.
F5 Friday: F5 ARX Cloud Extender Opens Cloud Storage
I’m not one to talk about the cloud all that much, generally speaking. It’s there, I realize it’s there and that companies are dealing with it more and more, but frankly there are enough people talking about it that I leave it to them to dish out all the necessary info to keep you abreast. People like Lori and, in this case since it’s dealing with storage as well, Don, are great at exactly that. In this joint post they talk about cloud based storage, why it’s designed horribly from the ground up, at least from the standpoint of someone trying to attach to it via conventional means is concerned, and how a cloud extender can help solve that problem. It’s pretty interesting stuff, honestly, even for cloud talk. Take a look and see if you can help your company save some time, money, energy or any combination thereof by getting them connected to cloud based storage easily.
DevCentral Weekly Podcast 157 – Security and Some Free Beer
We do the DC podcast every Thursday (at 2PM PST for those that might want to tune in) so it’s not normally something that I report on here unless there is something particularly interesting that crops up. It just so happens that this is such a week. We were lucky enough to wrangle not one, not two, but three, yes count them three F5 security types (Andy Oehler, Chris Webber, and Jonathan George) to hang out with us on the podcast this week. We talked about, as you might imagine, security. More specifically we talked about the new consolidated security group on DevCentral, how security is a moving target and continues to change with technology and the pressures being applied via standards and new requirements, and a whole lot more. We kind of squeezed a couple DevCentral topics in there at the end, but the meaty bits, the part with the guests who know their stuff, is right there at the front. Take a listen/look and see what these guys had to say about the security world from their perspective.
Java iControl Objects – Networking SelfIP
You can always count on Joe to dish out some smooth, refreshing, less filling iControl goodness, and that’s precisely what he’s done again here. It’s straight-forward, it’s detailed, it contains chunky chunks of code and it shows you how to set up a self IP on your F5 device via iControl, this tech tip has it all. It also illustrates something that could come in quite handy if you’re in the “I need to configure a bunch of boxes but don’t want to log into each one and manually make the changes” setting that some people are in more than they care to speak of. If you’re into that whole iControl thing, and I know I am, then definitely take a look. Heck, even if you’re not using iControl this series is a solid one, and there’s no time like the present to dive in.
20 Lines or Less #42 – Secret list … OF DOOM
Always last, but never least, the 20 Lines or Less is back yet again, bringing you three tasty morsels of iRules goodness in so few lines of code that they could safely travel under the speed limit in most US states. This week I’ve got a follow up from a post reaching way back that shows how a user eventually got in-line payload matching working to replace password data, some selective HTTP/HTTPS redirection on a single virtual, and a sweet bit of iRuling from our friendly FSEs that shows off how to perform some very handy rate limiting using the table command. All of these are cool examples, and weigh in at less than 21 lines of code each, which means anyone could grab them and get started right away. Maybe you’d rather tweak them to better suit your needs, either way is fine by me, just check them out, they’re cool. The last example is so cool in fact that I’m breaking it down into a full tech tip for Monday, in a wicked cool new style that Jason and I have been talking about. But that’s Monday, for now, take a look and check out some cool iRules.
There you have it, my favorite five from DevCentral this week. Be back next week for more, and as always, drop me a line if you have any comments, questions, suggestions or feedback of any sort.
#Colin
Published Dec 10, 2010
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