Advanced WAF IP Exceptions Manager
This solution introduces a dedicated Python-based GUI tool for managing IP whitelist exceptions in F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF policies. The tool was developed to simplify a common operational workflow: searching WAF policies, adding IP or CIDR-based exceptions, checking whether an IP already exists across policies, deleting outdated exceptions, applying policy changes, and tracking actions through an activity log. The solution is especially useful in large environments where manual exception handling can create operational overhead, inconsistent policy configuration, or audit challenges. It demonstrates how focused automation can deliver practical value without requiring a large orchestration platform or full CI/CD pipeline.
APM Policy Migration Between Standalone TMOS 17.1.3 Systems
Hi everyone, We're migrating a single production APM policy from an i4600 to an r4600 appliance. Both systems are running TMOS 17.1.3, and the new appliance will not be part of the existing DSC cluster. We tried exporting/importing only the APM policy, but the import fails because referenced objects are missing on the target system. A full UCS restore would also migrate many unused objects that we don't want. Is there a supported way to: Analyze an APM policy and list all required dependencies before import? Export/import only the APM Customization GUI (HTML/CSS/JavaScript templates)? Migrate a single APM policy without restoring the entire APM configuration? Any recommended best practices for this scenario would be appreciated. Thanks in advanced!
Secure and Harden Forward Proxies in NGINX Plus
Most people know NGINX as a reverse proxy, sitting in front of your servers to handle incoming traffic. Forward proxy works in the opposite direction. It sits between your internal users (or applications) and the outside world, managing outbound connections. NGINX Plus R36 introduced this capability through support for the HTTP CONNECT method. Before this, organizations often needed separate tools for inbound and outbound traffic control. Now you can handle both with a single platform. This unification in a single platform reduces operational overhead, streamlines application delivery and management, and reduces the attack surface of your application infrastructure.Changes to DO and AS3 GitHub - no longer monitored
I see Changes to DO and AS3 GitHub pages have been updated with these notices: " AS OF FEBRUARY 2026, THIS GITHUB REPOSITORY WILL NO LONGER BE MONITORED OR UPDATED. This repository will remain available, at least temporarily. You can find the latest RPMs and other files on MyF5 Downloads. Refer to 'Filing Issues and Getting Help' for additional details. " I'm also seeing [Deprecated] notices on some VS Code extensions, which may or may not be related. I haven't been able to find any larger announcements regarding these. I have not been able to find any additional detail. Does anyone know if we are about to see a a large shift (or loss) of tooling around BIG-IP?BIG-IP Report
Problem this snippet solves: Overview This is a script which will generate a report of the BIG-IP LTM configuration on all your load balancers making it easy to find information and get a comprehensive overview of virtual servers and pools connected to them. This information is used to relay information to NOC and developers to give them insight in where things are located and to be able to plan patching and deploys. I also use it myself as a quick way get information or gather data used as a foundation for RFC's, ie get a list of all external virtual servers without compression profiles. The script has been running on 13 pairs of load balancers, indexing over 1200 virtual servers for several years now and the report is widely used across the company and by many companies and governments across the world. It's easy to setup and use and only requires auditor (read-only) permissions on your devices. Demo/Preview Interactive demo http://loadbalancing.se/bigipreportdemo/ Screen shots The main report: The device overview: Certificate details: How to use this snippet: Installation instructions BigipReport REST This is the only branch we're updating since middle of 2020 and it supports 12.x and upwards. Downloads: https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/releases Documentation, installation instructions and troubleshooting: https://net-utilities.github.io/BigIPReport/ BIG-IP Report (Legacy) Older version of the report that only runs on Windows and is depending on a Powershell plugin originally written by Joe Pruitt (F5). The documentation for this will stay on loadbalancing.se. BIG-IP Report (only download this if you have v10 devices): https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/releases/download/v5.8.0/bigipreport-5.4.0-beta.zip iControl Snapin https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/releases/download/v5.8.0/f5-icontrol.zip Got issues/problems/feedback? Still have issues? Drop a comment below. We usually reply quite fast. Any bugs found, issues detected or ideas contributed makes the report better for everyone, so it's always appreciated. --- Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/7JJvPMYahA Tested this on versions: 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 (probably works on later versions too)API Discovery and Enforcement with API Security Local Edition
API Security Local Edition is a self-hosted platform that discovers APIs from BIG-IP traffic insights, builds and maintains an inventory with risk scoring, and pushes enforcement back to BIG-IP. This article covers the architecture, the data flows between components, and the operator workflow from discovery to enforcement.
APM SAML IdP - SP Issuer Extraction
Problem this snippet solves: APM doesn't expose any detail about the SAML SP Issuer when authentication requests hitting APM as an IdP during an SP initiated SAMLRequest. This iRule when applied to a SAML IdP enabled virtual server will extract the assertion request, decode it and present the SAML SP Issuer ID as the session variable %{session.saml.request.issuer} within APM. How to use this snippet: This comes in real handy when performing authorisation of the resource and could help avoid having APM perform a TCP connection reset when a SAML resource isn't authorised. Code : when CLIENT_ACCEPTED { ACCESS::restrict_irule_events disable } when HTTP_REQUEST { if { [HTTP::path] equals "/saml/idp/profile/redirectorpost/sso" } { if { [HTTP::method] equals "POST" } { # Colelct POST data set content_length [HTTP::header value Content-Length] HTTP::collect $content_length } elseif { [HTTP::method] equals "GET" } { #TODO } } } when HTTP_REQUEST_DATA { set payload_data [URI::decode [HTTP::payload]] log local0. "payload=[URI::query "?$payload_data" "SAMLRequest"]" if { $payload_data contains "SAMLRequest" } { # Extract SAML request data set SAMLdata [b64decode [URI::query "?$payload_data" "SAMLRequest"]] set SAML_Issuer_loc [string first "saml:issuer" [string tolower $SAMLdata]] set SAML_Issuer_start [expr {[string first ">" $SAMLdata $SAML_Issuer_loc] + 1}] set SAML_Issuer_end [expr {[string first "<" $SAMLdata $SAML_Issuer_start] - 1}] set SAML_Issuer [string range $SAMLdata $SAML_Issuer_start $SAML_Issuer_end] if { !([ACCESS::session sid] equals "" ) } { ACCESS::session data set session.saml.request.issuer $SAML_Issuer } } } when ACCESS_SESSION_STARTED { if { [info exists SAML_Issuer] } { ACCESS::session data set session.saml.request.issuer $SAML_Issuer } } Tested this on version: 11.6NGINX Gateway Fabric - Data Plane Programmability with NGINX JavaScript
This post walks through a pattern for injecting NGINX JavaScript logic into NGINX Gateway Fabric using Kubernetes-native extension points to enable data plane programmability, with an F5 AI Guardrails integration as a worked example.
Creating a tmsh script with iControl REST and using it to restart HTTPD
Problem this snippet solves: TMSH has the ability to create tcl scripts that can be used to run multiple commands and transactions. It is rare that you will want to create on with TMSH but there are a few cases where this may be desirable. One of these is to restart HTTPD, which is difficult to do from iControl REST because the REST API is running over HTTPD and the restart will not be clean. See K13292945. This Python script creates a tmsh script, and then runs it to restart HTTPD. How to use this snippet: Syntax is <program_name.py> host user password Sample output: ./rest_script_example.py 10.155.117.12 admin admin Before httpd (pid 3186) is running... After httpd (pid 3289) is running... Code : #!/usr/bin/python #[email protected] #Makes tmsh script to restart HTTP #Syntax: host username password import json #allow python 2 and python 3 by loading the correct libraries. try: from http.client import BadStatusLine from urllib.parse import urlparse, urlencode from urllib.request import urlopen, Request from urllib.error import HTTPError except ImportError: from httplib import BadStatusLine from urlparse import urlparse from urllib import urlencode from urllib2 import urlopen, Request, HTTPError import ssl import sys import time #Internal calls will not verify certs so disable cert verification. ssl._create_default_https_context = ssl._create_unverified_context #Create request for token based authentication. This is in Bigip 12 and later: url = 'https://'+sys.argv[1]+'/mgmt/shared/authn/login' values = {'username' : sys.argv[2], 'password' : sys.argv[3], 'loginProviderName' : 'tmos'} values = json.dumps(values).encode('utf-8') Request(url,data=values) req = Request(url,data=values) req.add_header('Content-Type' , 'application/json') #Request authentication token. response = urlopen(req) #auth=result will be a json data structure. auth_result = response.read() #print (auth_result) #Json.loads makes an internal python data structure that is easier to extract auth token from json. #Now construct icontrol rest query for device-groups info. auth=json.loads(auth_result) token=(auth['token']['token']) #print(token) #Get current PID of HTTPD url = 'https://'+sys.argv[1]+'/mgmt/tm/sys/service/httpd/stats' req = Request(url) req.add_header('X-F5-Auth-Token',auth['token']['token']) response = urlopen(req,data=None) json_response=(response.read()) python_response=json.loads(json_response) print("Before") print(python_response["apiRawValues"]["apiAnonymous"]) #look for script with name to make sure that the script does not already exist url = 'https://'+sys.argv[1]+'/mgmt/tm/cli/script/example.tcl' #urllib2 raises an exception with an HTTP 404 req = Request(url) req.add_header('X-F5-Auth-Token',auth['token']['token']) try: response = urlopen(req,data=None) except HTTPError as err: if err.code==404: #print (err.code) #print("\nCreate cli script\n") #request create here url = 'https://'+sys.argv[1]+'/mgmt/tm/cli/script' req = Request(url) req.add_header('X-F5-Auth-Token',auth['token']['token']) req.add_header('Content-Type' , 'application/json') values = {"name":"example.tcl", "apiAnonymous": "proc script::init {} {\n}\n\nproc script::run {} {\n tmsh::run util bash -c 'killall -9 httpd' \n tmsh::start sys service httpd\n} \n\nproc script::help {} {\n}\n\nproc script::tabc {} {\n}\n"} values = json.dumps(values) response = urlopen(req,data=values) response_py=(json.load(response)) #print(json.dumps(response_py,sort_keys=True,indent=4)) #Now run script url = 'https://'+sys.argv[1]+'/mgmt/tm/cli/script/example.tcl' req = Request(url) req.add_header('X-F5-Auth-Token',auth['token']['token']) req.add_header('Content-Type' , 'application/json') values = {"kind":"tm:cli:script:runstate","command":"run"} values = json.dumps(values).encode('utf-8') # Killing HTTPD will abort the connection so catch the exception. try: urlopen(req,data=values) except BadStatusLine: pass #Wait for httpd to restart so you can query. time.sleep(5) #Get current PID of HTTPD after restart url = 'https://'+sys.argv[1]+'/mgmt/tm/sys/service/httpd/stats' req = Request(url) req.add_header('X-F5-Auth-Token',auth['token']['token']) response = urlopen(req,data=None) json_response=(response.read()) python_response=json.loads(json_response) print("After") print(python_response["apiRawValues"]["apiAnonymous"]) Tested this on version: 13.0
