Monitor instances with the 4.2 BigIP

[Michel_van_der_]

Given that the Monitor2 api does not exists, what is the best way to discover all defined monitor instances, such as you can find on the 'node associations' screen in the BigIP GUI?

[Michel_van_der_]

To answer my own question, I ended up running

ITCMLocalLB.Node.get_node_server_list

and then for each of those nodes I did

ITCMLocalLB.Monitor.get_node_monitor

That seemed to work. Can post perl code for those of you who use that...

[Michel_van_der_]

One thing left. how do I determine the 'Basic Associations' for the 'Standard' services (as it shows on the GUI)? I tried using (e.g.) -1 for the ip address and 389 for the port, but I did not find the custom monitor we've defined. We're using PTF2, so the Monitor2 interface is out... What am I missing?

[Loc_Pham_101863]

Just a thought, but would it be easier to just save off a copy of bigip.conf file for safe-keeping, and then nuke all BIGIP-specific configurations in bigip.conf, instead of trying to reverse or "undo" the configurations using iControl ? Once you have a clean slate, then you can then use iControl to reconstruct your configurations.

[Michel_van_der_]

OK, here goes. I have a simple web application, built with LAMP, which contains the 'configuration' of the various F5 BigIPs we have on our network. This is not the configuration from the F5 appliance perspective, it's the configuration that describes how we want the devices to work for our environment. We don't even use 50% of the devices flexibility; we do however do some interesting stuff with rules and pools. Given that complexity, we want to be able to configure and deploy the devices from a central location, reliably and identically (as much as you can within the network config off course). The application than takes the specified configuration, which contains mostly IP addresses, pools, rules and monitor definitions and turns it into a large bigpipe command file (i.e. shell script). I can then take that command file to a BigIP device, which has only the basic 'config' script run on it and finish the configuration. This is off course inconvenient and the iControl API allows me to do most (all?) of this from my application, without having to transfer a bigpipe command file. So, my first step is to start building a new piece, which will undo everything I did to the device with the command file (reverse order), using iControl. Once that's done, I can recreate the command file functionality as well. So, my first step was to undo all monitor instances, which I'm first trying to find. That's where most of my initial questions came from. Baby steps! 🙂 So, one thing I still haven't figured out is how to remove the piece described below, the 'Basic Associations' for the 'Standard' services (as it shows on the GUI)? The rest of what I built I have now figured out how to undo with iControl. Rebuilding using iControl is next. Hope that is clear....

[Michel_van_der_]

Wooooow. Not sure your service guys would be happy with that suggestion. :lol: Off course the whole idea is to do it all centrally, without having to log on to the box at all. I'm really running a little ahead of what I hope iSMan will provide RSN. I think I'm almost there. I'm going to work on the rebuilding stuff today.

[Joe_Pruitt]

Can you explain in some more detail as to which methods you are using and what you would like to do. I'm not sure what -1 for the ip address and 389 for the port is referencing. Are you creating a monitor, or trying to access and modify an already created one?

[Michel_van_der_]

Nope, since ISMan currently doesn't really configure devices. It can do backup of systems which are running. but again we're going to different products to do the work. ISMan (I think) will come close to what I want, but according to Matt Daimler it won't happen until Q1/2004 in a limited sense.

[Loc_Pham_101863]

You're right, our service guys probably won't like that idea 🙂 I was just suggesting that it might be a easier way to undo your configuration; you still have a backup of the configuration to recover if needed, and you'll only have to log onto the box once, just for this special occasion. 🙂 ISMan will definitely help you quite a bit in your endeavors.