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Kevin_Davies's avatar
Nov 30, 2022

Artistry of Networking

I was just answering a question and giving suggestions to new people starting the F5 journey. I mean only the passionate get this far as we delve deeper into the protocols than anyone. This led to a moment of reflection I though I would share.

"I could easily spend a couple of days… learning all about the settings available on the TCP profile alone. LTM has a huge number of nobs you can tweak and most of them will be specific to your network requirements. I’d start with the preset profiles first as a base then tune from there. It’s a lot of fun learning about all the protocol options.

Some of them come from the first RFC of the TCP protocol, others in more recent years. In fact if you want to be a gun/guru in this space it’s worth reading the RFC’s and the evolution of the TCP, UDP and HTTP protocols. About a months worth of fun right there. Sit yourself next to a nice warm fire 🔥 of the crap books you will read on the topic and build your own library.

Because what you are actually reading is the creative output of a million man hours of dedicated work from the best minds on this planet. They carefully crafted a networking model and protocol stack that you live and breath on every day.

When you sit back and take it all in, you begin to realise what a work of art it truly is. Not only the protocols but the framework that was built to have general consensus on contributing new ones. I look over at my UDR console and it tells me my two child family has 32 network connected devices… even Australia did its part. God bless them, god bless them all. 

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