Sideband Connection ID
hi f5'ers, We've encountered a weird problem when upgrading Big-IP from v14 to v16 in conenction with sideband and Node.js. We have an iRule which opens a sideband connection to the local Node.js instance, streaming an XML string which is then converted to JSOn format and returned to the iRule for further processing. This all works like a dream in v14, super fast and without issue. When we upgrade to v16 Big-IP we noticed that 5 minutes after the first sideband connection to Node.js the node.js instance is restarted. Then 5 minutes after the first sideband connection is received by teh restart Node.js it is restarted again and so on every 5 minutes. When node.js is restarted there is an interruption in our transformation service which is not really acceptable. We thought we had found a "workaround" by setting the idle timeout on the TCP profile associated with the virtual server the sideband is connecting from 300 seconds to "indefinite". This does seem to prevent the Node.js instance from rebooting BUT we noticed the free memory is all used up over an hour or so and there is anotehr event after 75 minutes that also results in transformation service loss. Whilst investigating this issue tonight I put a line in the iRule to log the connection ID for the sideband connection and came across somethgin weird. This is the code which creates the new sideband connection and assigns connection identifier variable $conn_id set conn_id [connect -myaddr [IP::local_addr] -protocol TCP -timeout 5000 -idle 30 -status conn_status VS_CISR_JSON_SIDEBAND_XMLtoJSON1] BUT if I try and log the variable $conn_id in /var/log/ltm with the command log -noname local0.info "ConnectionID: $conn_id" I actuall see "Connection ID:connect -protocol TCP -myaddr 10.0.31.110 -idle 30 -timeout 5000 /LDL/VS_CISR_JSON_SIDEBAND_XMLtoJSON1" Is this right? I was expecting the variable $conn_id to be some sort of numeric identifier which referenced the sideband connection instance, something like "7665e87as778e788778" not the actual string used to create teh sideband connection. I'm pretty sure this is wher eour problem lies now, the sideband conenction isn't getting closed correctly with the "close $conn_id" command in the iRule so it times out after 300 seconds. Does anyone else actually use Sideband and if you do what does your connection identifier look like? Thanks in advance, Peter
