F5 BIGIP & XC certbot plugin
Hi! As I maintain the certbot-f5bigip plugin to enable the certbot as ACME client to validate and install certificates, I now published the certbot-f5xc plugin! Currently only DNS validation with the DNS01 challenge is supported, so if you use F5 XC for DNS, you can use this plugin to verify domains for your certificates and use the certificate then for other infrastructure beside XC HTTP LBs (which can do auto-cert provisioning already). I will add an installer next, so certificates can be uploaded / installed to XC and re-used with HTTP LBs, so stay tuned! Here are the links to the repositories on gitlab.com: https://gitlab.com/emalzer/certbot-f5bigip https://gitlab.com/emalzer/certbot-f5xc https://gitlab.com/emalzer/certbot-ansible
How can I get started with iCall
Hi all . Recently, I want to learn how to use iCall to do some automated operations work, but I haven't seen any comprehensive tutorials about iCall on askf5. Are there any good articles I can refer to for learning? Do I need to systematically learn Tcl first? I still have a question about iCall. What is the difference between using iCall and using shell scripts with scheduled tasks to achieve automated management and configuration of F5? Best Regards
Terraform AS3 code for GTM Only.
Hello All, I am really really suffering here :( Have been looking for GTM ONLY code in AS3 form, need a simple code hardcoded values will also work. I have seen documentation and couldn't see exact use case. We are doing POC for where VMs are direct;y added to GTM and NO LTM component are there. I can't post my LTM + GTM code as its in office. Would really appreciate any help and guidance here. Any simple code work snippet using only AS3 please.NGINX App Protect v5 Signature Notifications
When working with NAP (NGINX App Protect) you don't have an easy way of knowing when any of the signatures are updated. As an old BigIP guy I find that rather strange. Here you have build-in automatic updates and notifications. Unfortunately there isn't any API's you can probe which would have been the best way of doing it. Hopefully it will come one day. However, "friction" and "hard" will not keep me from finding a solution 😆 I have previously made a solution for NAPv4 and I have tried mentally to get me going on a NAPv5 version. The reason for the delay is in the different way NAPv4 and NAPv5 are designed. Where NAPv4 is one module loaded in NGINX, NAPv5 is completely detached from NGINX (well almost, you still need to load a small module to get the traffic from NGINX to NAP) and only works with containers. NAPv5 has moved the signature "storage" from the actual host it is running on (e.g. an installed package) to the policy. This has the consequence that finding a valid "source of truth", for the latest signature versions, is not as simple as building a new image and see which versions got installed. There are very good reasons for this design that I will come back to later. When you fire up NAPv5 you got three containers for the data plane (NGINX, waf-enforcer and waf-config-mgr) and one for the "control plane" (waf-compiler). For this solution the "control plane" is the useful one. It isn't really a control plane but it gives a nice picture of how it is detached from the actual processing of traffic. When you update your signatures you are actually doing it through the waf-compiler. The waf-compiler is a container hosting the actual signature databases and every time a new verison is released you need to rebuild this container and compile your policies into a new version and reload NGINX. And this is what I take advantage of when I look for signature updates. It has the upside that you only need the waf-compiler to get the information you need. My solution will take care of the entire process and make sure that you are always running with the latest signatures. Back to the reason why the split of functions is a very good thing. When you build a new version of the NGINX image and deploy it into production, NAP needs to compile the policies as they load. During the compilation NGINX is not moving any traffic! This becomes a annoying problem even when you have a low number of policies. I have installations where it takes 5 to 10 minutes from deployment of the new image until it starts moving traffic. That is a crazy long time when you are used to working with micro-services and expect everything to flip within seconds. If you have your NAPv4 hooked up to a NGINX Instance Manager (NIM) the problem is somewhat mitigated as NIM will compile the policies before sending them to the gateways. NIM is not a nimble piece of software so it doesn't always fit into the environment. And now here is my hack to the notification problem: The solution consist of two bash scripts and one html template. The template is used when sending a notification mail. I wanted it to be pretty and that was easiest with html. Strictly speaking you could do with just a simple text based mail. Save all three in the same directory. The main script is called "waf_policy_auto_compile.sh"and is the one you put into crontab. The main script will build a new waf-compiler image and compile a test policy. The outcome of that is information about what versions are the newest. It will then extract versions from an old policy and simply see if any of the versions differ. For this to work you need to have an uncompiled policy (you can just use the default one) and a compiled version of it ready beforehand. When a diff has been identified the notification logic is executed and a second script is called: "compile_waf_policies.sh". It basically just trawls through the directory of you policies and logging profiles and compiles a new version of them all. It is not necessary to recompile the logging profiles, so this will probably change in the next version. As the compilation completes the main script will nudge NGINX to reload thus implement all the new versions. You can run "waf_policy_auto_compile.sh" with a verbose flag (-v) and a debug flag (-d). The verbose flag is intended to be used when you run it on a terminal and want the information displayed there. Debug is, well, for debug 😝 The construction of the scripts are based on my own needs but they should be easy to adjust for any need. I will be happy for any feedback, so please don't hold back 😄
iControl REST API: models + specifications?
Hi. In these docs we can find the endpoints and options for the REST API. https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/icontrol-rest/ We don't find the models/specifications that these endpoints return. Eg. we can query for the list of pools. The answer contains the property 'loadBalancingMode'. https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/icontrol-rest/APIRef_tm_ltm_pool.html But where can we find the documented, complete list of values that this property can contain? From the GUI we can assume the values would be similar to Round Robin, Ratio (member), Least Connections (member), ... But where are all possible values of all properties of all the models defined and documented?
Install rpm packages using tmsh
Hi everyone, I’m trying to install the F5 Cloud Failover Extension (CFE) on my BIG-IP system, but I’m struggling to properly install the RPM package so that it appears under iApps → Package Management LX. Here’s what I have done so far: Successfully downloaded f5-cloud-failover-2.1.3-3.noarch.rpm Tried installing the package using rpm -ivh f5-cloud-failover-2.1.3-3.noarch.rpm. Restarted the REST API service using tmsh restart sys service restjavad. Despite these steps, the package does not appear under iApps → Package Management LX Also when I reinstall the package I get "package f5-cloud-failover-2.1.3-3.noarch is already installed" Is there a specific command to install RPM packages via TMSH so they are properly recognized? Or is there another step required to make the extension available? Thanks in advance for any insights!
How to upload a .pfx file using terraform in F5 Distributed Cloud Console.
Hi, I have the certificate.pfx file in the same directory with the terraform code. For the moment, this certificate is generated local with a simple password "password12345" stored in tfvars. How i can upload this certificate.pfx using volterra_certificate Can someone send me a example? Thanks!AS3 Limitations
Below are some limitations of AS3 as means of Automation. config deployment is locked down by Automation, no manual intervention possible for below use cases - incidents - new requirements/features need to wait for automation to be updated - Automation failures cause deployment to be stalled until automation is fixed - Operational issues, maybe require out-of-band changes outside of AS3 - Source of truth must be reconciled periodically with F5 device to check for config drift - 2 layers of failures during config deployment one is Automation and second is source of truth, therefore involves more troubleshooting effort - Reliance on an External Source of Truth management, non-native to F5 and not supported by F5 - AS3 is Less mature compared to iControl Rest, iControl Rest was introduced in TMOS 11.x
