HI our application vendor recommend we implement nPath (direct server return) - which we did with the help of F5 support ... it took several engineers but we were able to implement nPath and it resolved our connection and random drop out client issues.
We are trying to use the F5 now to display a maintenance page BUT since we have nPath it changes things ...and seems like we can not ...
Can we display a maintenance page in an nPath config ??? if so how can we accomplish that ... We are open to other suggestions even if we have to do manual intervention .. like bring up another VS - and flip between both.
@VR12from my understanding nPath should only mess with return traffic when the server receives the request. If you are attempting to implement a maintenance page that should be logic that is used prior to sending the traffic from the BIG-IP to the server. You should be able to use an iRule with a maintenance page to perform this.
Thanks Paulius - we just want to display a under maintenance page - at this time we do not care about having it automatically displayed when the POOL is down ..... we will enable it manually.
So to explain we have iRule set for nPath to work .... as per the articles they mention a standard setup to auto display maint page when pool is down ...... and following the article it can not be configured because rule is configured different for nPath.
Servers will be down for maint so POOL will be down ... so we are looking for a way to have the maint page enabled at that time.
Would it be possible to have 2 profiles for the same VIP --- and enable as needed .. prod or maint.
Sorry our F5 is managed by a different group.. and looking for suggestions so we can ask them try ..as we have been been told its not possible in nPAth config ... BUT again if pool is down we are not using nPath.
You won't be able to have 2 VIPs with the exact same IP/port combo but since you're doing this manually, you could always have a bogus port specified for the maintenance page VIP and your manual process is simply adjusting the port.
Thank you Buulam - there is a part I don't understand - So
We have DNS entry to sample.com vip (config uses nPath) set to , lets say just to discuss, to 10.0.0.15 with pool of 2 servers that will be down for maintenance.
So we would create a New VIP with 10.0.0.20 and ???
how would we point sample.com to new VIP or maint page from new VIP to respond to requests to 10.0.0.15 sample.com ( don't care to much for doing DNS changes since have to deal with caching - tried that already.)
Thanks buulam - we will try that - and also will actually help us , because being that the primary VIP will display the maintenance page - we can use the temp vip to access the systems and test before releasing back to users .
