Manage VE via serial connection - or sort of :-)
Hi, Maybe obvious, maybe not very useful (but in my own lab quite so)... but was not so obvious for me so I decided to share my findings. Here are steps that enable to connect and manage BIG-IP VE via pseudo-serial connection using telnet. Edit VM settings via available client - add Serial Port device (unfortunately VM has to be powered off to add this device) Choose Connect via Network Select (Network Backing section in my vSphere Client) Server (VM listens for connection) In Port URI enter: telnet://{vCenter or ESXi IP}:{port} - sure port should not collide with well know services, my choice starts with 5000 One more thing to check is how ESXi Firewall is configured. Click on ESX host, then Configuration tab, then Security Profile and finally Properties on the right Find VM serial port connected over network. Should be checked with Incoming ports including ports used in telnet URI - if it is not then either change your ports or reconfigure this rule - but I don't know how :-( After VM is booted again you can connect to confiured serial port with for example putty, set connection like that: IP: ESX IP Port: port used when configuring telnet URI Connection Type: Telnet After hitting Open there is black screen but hitting Enter should bring login prompt. Then everything is as with ssh connection - maybe except some strange refresh artifacts from time to time :-) One more thing worth configuring on VE itself - serial port baud rate. By default it's 9800 and cli is rather sluggish. Change it to maximum setting of 115200 - then interface works much better. tmsh modify sys console baud-rate 115200 Piotr P.S Maybe URI ssh:// will work but I never tested it.
Internal IP via APM unable to browse intranet sites
Dear all, encountered a weird scenario. WebTop portal links work well and when I do a telnet port 80/443 from F5 CLI to various internal sites, connection was a success. (via F5's internal self-IP Automap) When users receive an internal IP (This was needed because of mobile phone-only users) and tried to browse to the sites directly by entering the URL, it couldn't connect. When I tried telnet port 80/443 to these URLs, connection failed. The internal IP lease pool and F5's internal self-IP are in the same subnet. Anyone encountered such problem before?
Can i do a telnet to a node within a partition + router domain
Situation: We have a viprion with a virtual guest In the virtual guest we have several partition with corresponding router domain number. example: partitionname: customer-229 with ID 229 and the router domain number with ID 229. Within the partition we build vips, nodes, healthcheck etc. Just like the normal activities what you do with LTM . If i want to ping to a specific node within a partition i do "ping node%229". This works fine. Do you also have this option for telnet? like "telnet node%229 80"?? I couldn't find anything on the internet. Regards, Frans
