Advent of Code - 2024
Who's in? I got day 1 in python knocked out (yesterday now, 12:35am local as I write this) earlier today. Going to see if I can mock up part 1 of day 1 in an iRule for tomorrow morning's brain exercise...will share my results! I created a leaderboard if we want to get competitive in all this. Code is 4383550-0e9fdf83 if you want to join in.
APM parse HTTP Connector json to message box, iRule etc.
Hello all, I have configured per-session and per-request policies on my APM (APM+LTM) mode and in the process of authentication I want to get some data from external web server. Data is in JSON format. To do that I have created HTTP Connector, assigned it to my per-request policy via subroutine and i can see that the subsession variables are beeing populated correctly via the HTTP Connector (with option save data, i can parse it but the result is the same, just more variables - one per JSON field). In the Overview:Active Session i can see subsession with the following variable with my data: 879cb369./Common/HTTPConnector/XXXXXXXXXXX==.nvp_block.subsession.http_connector.body Now I wanted to get this data and use it in my authentication flow and iRule but it doesn't work. First I wanted to test it, by assiginig variable and showing a simple message box in PerReq-policy: And after that the massage box with: %{perflow.custom} - it doesnt work. Also tried to just show it in logs with iRule like in documentationltm rule command ACCESS perflow (f5.com) So i created an iRule agent in per-request-policy pointing to bellow iRule and attached iRule to my VS: when ACCESS_PER_REQUEST_AGENT_EVENT { set $body [ACCESS::perflow get subsession.http_connector.body] log local0. $body } But it doesnt show anything. I have few questions: Is it even possible to access variables in subsession that got retrieved via HTTPConnector and use it further? For example to build JWT for auth? Can I assign more than two custom variables from subsession? according to this guide i can only use perflow.custom and perflow.scratchpad?: Using Variable Assign to populate gating criteria,Using Variable Assign to populate gating criteria,Using Variable Assign to populate gating criteria (f5.com) Using Variable Assign to populate a perflow variable other than perflow.custom and perflow.scratchpad causes subroutine results to become unreliable. 3. Maybe there is an other option to achieve my goal?
Very Dark Black Screen Issue After Logging into BIG-IP Web GUI
Hi everyone, Very Dark Black screen appears when I try to access the BIG-IP Web GUI. The login page loads fine, but after logging in, the screen stays blank, and no interface elements are displayed.I have tried using different browsers and cleared the cache, but the issue persists. Has anyone experienced this or knows how to resolve it? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!how to enable or disable DOS dashboard on big-ip?
we have enabled ddos under security, but suddenly nothing is displayed under the DOS dashboard under "Statisitcs" disappeared, it seems someone changed the setting. Can anyone please advise how he/she change the setting to disable the system to show the statistics about DOS? thanks in advance!Global Live Webinar (12/11): Delivering and Securing AI with F5 - Today and in the Future
Delivering and Securing Al with F5 - Today and in the Future This webinar event is open to all F5 users regardless of geographic location. Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2024 Time:10:00am PT | 1:00pm ET What's the webinar about? Modern enterprises are racing to stay ahead in AI's competitive landscape. F5's AI factory reference architecture scales AI, driving innovation and efficiency. F5 NGINX optimizes AI performance by managing traffic, ensuring scalability, and providing robust security, particularly in Kubernetes environments. F5's latest innovations deliver advanced security, seamless integrations, and optimized data throughput. This webinar offers valuable insights for organizations at any stage of their AI journey, helping to source, build, secure, and deliver real AI value. In this webinar, we’ll cover: Understand F5's AI Factory Reference Architecture: Learn how F5's scalable AI solutions drive innovation and efficiency across modern enterprises. Optimize AI Performance with NGINX: Discover how NGINX enhances AI operations by effectively managing traffic, ensuring scalability, and providing robust security, especially within Kubernetes environments. Explore F5’s latest innovation: Gain insights into F5’s AI Gateway that provides advanced security measures and optimized data output for AI Architectures. Learn more, register now
High CPU utilization (100%).
I observed high CPU utilization (100%) on F5 device, resource provision ASM nominal. I checked the client-side throughput and server-side throughput both are normal but found management interface throughput is very high and what i noticed this is happening in same time period for last 30 days. What could be the reason for this spike. Many thanks in advanced for your time and consideration.Happy 20th Birthday, BIG-IP TMOS!
I wasn’t in the waiting room with the F5 family, ears and eyes perked for the release announcement of BIG-IP version 9.0. I was a customer back in 2004, working on a government contract at Scott AFB, Illinois. I shared ownership of the F5 infrastructure, pairs of BIG-IPs running version 4.5 on Dell PowerEdge 2250 servers with one other guy. But maybe a month or two before the official first release of TMOS, my F5 account manager dropped off some shiny new hardware. And it was legit purpose-built and snazzy, not some garage-style hacked Frankenstein of COTS parts like the earlier stuff. And you wonder why we chose Dell servers! Anyway, I was a hard-core network engineer at this time, with very little exposure to anything above layer four, and even there, my understanding was limited to ports and ACLs and maybe a little high-level clarity around transport protocols. But application protocols? Nah. No idea. So with this new hardware and an entirely new full-proxy architecture (what’s a proxy, again?) I was overwhelmed. And honestly, I was frustrated with it for the first few days because I didn’t know what I didn’t know and so I struggled to figure out what to do with it, even to replicate my half-proxy configuration in the “new way”. But I’m a curious person. Given enough time and caffeine, I can usually get to the bottom of a problem, at least well enough to arrive at a workable solution. And so I did. My typical approach to anything is to make it work, make it work better, make it work reliably better, then finally make it work reliably and more performantly better. And the beauty here with this new TMOS system is that I was armed with a treasure trove of new toys. The short list I dug into during my beta trial, which lasted for a couple of weeks: The concept of a profile. When you support a few applications, this is no big deal. When you support hundreds, being able to macro configuration snippets within your application and across applications was revolutionary. Not just for the final solution, but also for setting up and executing your test plans. iRules. Yes, technically they existed in 4.x, but they were very limited in scope. With TMOS, F5 introduced the Tcl-based and F5 extended live-traffic scripting environment that unleashed tremendous power and flexibility for network and application teams. I dabbled with this, and thought I understood exactly how useful this was. More on this a little later. A host operating system. I was a router, switch, and firewall guy. Nothing I worked on had this capability. I mean, a linux system built in to my networking device? YES!!! Two things I never knew I always needed during my trial: 1) tcpdump ON BOX. Seriously--mind blown; and 2) perl scripting against config and snmp. Yeah, I know, I laugh about perl now. But 20 years ago, it was the cats pajamas. A fortunate job change Shortly after my trial was over, I interviewed for an accepted a job offer from a major rental car company that was looking to hire an engineer to redesign their application load balancing infrastructure and select the next gear purchase for the effort. We evaluated Cisco, Nortel/Alteon, Radware, and F5 on my recommendation. With our team’s resident architect we drafted the rubric with which we’d evaluate all the products, and whereas there were some layer two performance issues in some packet sizes that were arguably less than real-world, the BIG-IP blew away the competitors across the board. Particularly, though, in configurability and instrumentation. Tcpdump on box was such a game-changer for us. Did we have issues with TMOS version 9? For sure. My first year with TMOS was also TMOS's first year. Bugs are going to happen with any release, but a brand new thing is guaranteed. But F5 support was awesome, and we worked through all the issues in due time. Anyway, I want to share three wins in my first year with TMOS. Win #1 Our first production rollout was in the internet space, on BIG-IP version 9.0.5. That’s right, a .0 release. TMOS was a brand new baby, and we had great confidence throughout our testing. During our maintenance, once we flipped over the BIG-IPs, our rental transaction monitors all turned red and the scripted rental process had increased by 50%! Not good. “What is this F5 stuff? Send it back!!” But it was new, and we knew we had a gem here. We took packet captures on box, of course, then rolled back and took more packet captures, this time through taps because our old stuff didn’t have tcpdump on box. This is where Jason started to really learn about the implications of both a full proxy architecture and the TCP protocol. It turns our our application servers had a highly-tuned TCP stack on them specific to the characteristics of the rental application. We didn’t know this, of course. But since we implemented a proxy that terminates clients at the BIG-IP and starts a new session to the servers, all those customizations for WAN traffic were lost. Once we built a TCP profile specifically for the rental application servers and tested it under WAN emulation, we not only reached parity with the prior performance but beat it by 10%. Huzzah! Go BIG-IP custom protocol stack configuration! Win #2 For the next internal project, I had to rearchitect the terminal server farm. We had over 700 servers in two datacenters supporting over 60,000 thin clients around the world for rental terminals. Any failures meant paper tickets and unhappy staff and customers. One thing that was problematic with the existing solution is that sometimes clients would detach and upon reconnect would connect directly to the server, which skewed the load balancers view of the world and frequently overloaded some servers to the point all sessions on that server would hang until metrics (but usually angry staff) would notify. Remember my iRules comment earlier on differentiators? Well, iRules architect David Hansen happened to be a community hero and was very helpful to me in the DevCentral forums and really opened my eyes to the art of possible with iRules. He was able to take the RDP session token that was being returned by the client, read it, translate it from its Microsoft encoding format, and then forward the session on to the correct server in the backend so that all sessions continued to be accounted for in our load balancing tier. This was formative for me as a technologist and as a member of the DevCentral community. Win #3 2004-2005 was the era before security patching was as visible a responsibility as it is today, but even then we had a process and concerns when there were obstacles. We had an internal application that had a plugin for the web tier that managed all the sessions to the app tier, and this plugin was no longer supported. We were almost a year behind on system and application patches because we had no replacement for this. Enter, again, iRules.I was able to rebuild the logic of the plugin in an iRule that IIRCwasn’tmore than 30 lines. So the benefits ended up not only being a solution to that problem, but the ability to remove that web tier altogether, saving on equipment, power, and complexity costs. And that was just the beginning... TMOS was mature upon arrival, but it got better every year. iControl added REST-based API access; clustered multi-processing introduced tremendous performance gains; TMOS got virtualized, and all the home-lab technologists shouted with joy; a plugin architecture allowed for product modules like ASM and APM; solutions that began as iRules like AFM and SSLO became products. It’s crazy how much innovation has taken place on this platform! The introduction of TMOS didn’t just introduce me to applications and programmability. It did that and I’m grateful, but it did so much more. It unlocked in me that fanboy level that fans of sports teams, video game platforms, Taylor Swift, etc, experience. It helped me build an online community at DevCentral, long before I was an employee. Happy 20th Birthday, TMOS! We celebrate and salute you!ASM don't block attack XSS
hi all, I enabled all the XSS signatures and all signatures are state no staging. why the asm don't block this : <script>alert("attack")</script> It match to some Attack Signature ID : 200101609 , 200001088, 200000098, 200001475 Here is state of signature ID 200001475 Thanks.Elevate Your Skills - Register for AppWorld 2025
AppWorld 2025 is set for February 25-27 in Las Vegas. Focusing on application security and delivery, this three-day event is packed with expert-led sessions, hands-on labs, and networking opportunities for practitioners and experts from around the world. F5 Academy is at the Heart of AppWorld 2025. Ideal for those working towards certification. You’ll engage with F5's latest products through hands-on labs, sharpen your skills, and earn digital badges. One free certification practice exam will be available before the event. You can earn (ISC)2 CPE credits for certain security-focused labs, and F5 will handle credit submission for you. --------------------------------------- UPDATE Nov 11. --------------------------------------- Labs and Briefings To Attend Find the full list of labs and briefingson the F5 Academy at AppWorld 25 page. F5 in the AI Era: For users who are new to AI, this briefing explores how F5 technology can help organizations with their AI journeys. F5 NGINX One: Learn how the NGINX One console provides visibility into a global fleet of NGINX instances, both NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source (OSS). F5 Distributed Cloud: Discovering & Securing APIs: Get hands-on experience with the API Discovery and Security capabilities of F5 Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) within F5 Distributed Cloud. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why Attend? Learn: Access a year's worth of knowledge in three days through keynotes, solution-focused breakouts, product deep-dives, and roundtables. Connect: Network with professionals from DevCentral, NGINX, and F5 Insiders communities. Influence: Share your experiences with BIG-IP, Distributed Cloud, and NGINX to influence F5’s technology direction. Elevate your technical skills and connect with peers at AppWorld 2025; a must-attend event. Register for AppWorld 2025 today and join us in Las Vegas!Global Live Webinar (12/05):F5 rSeries & VELOS: Al, Innovations, and Cloud Integration
F5 rSeries & VELOS: Al, Innovations, and Cloud Integration This webinar event is open to all F5 users regardless of geographic location. Date: Thursday, December 5, 2024 Time:10:00am PT | 1:00pm ET What's the webinar about? Join our webinar to explore the latest features in F5's rSeries and VELOS Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and learn how they can revolutionize your approach to cloud integration and AI workloads. In this webinar, we’ll cover: Learn how F5’s rSeries and VELOS ADCs optimize cloud environments for seamless integration and enhanced performance. Discover how these platforms are designed to efficiently support AI workloads, including multi-terabit data ingest and processing. Gain insights into how F5’s advanced ADCs provide scalable solutions that enhance security across both cloud and on-premises environments. Dive into the latest innovations in F5's rSeries and VELOS, understanding their role in modernizing application delivery. Learn more, register now Note. If you can't make this live webinar, still register and will send you a link to the on-demand recording.
