Jason Rahm

DevCentral has many rock star contributors.  Most are not affiliated officially with F5 Networks, or DevCentral for that matter, but there are several F5ers who believe in the community, and really believe in the F5 story.  One of those F5ers is Matt Cauthorn, or as you know him in the community, L4L7.  You may recognize Matt as the author of pyControl.  Well, not only did he provide this entrance to a better iControl experience, he has also delivered in a major way with his Vim plugin for editing iRules (utilizing pyControl of course to make those calls to BIG-IP).  I had toyed around with a few different editors, (ecoder and Eric for example) but never made it to a point it was solid enough to release.  Vim never occurred to me--that’s ten negative cool points for me.  I asked Matt why he went down the Vim path: Vim is so extensible and common that it was a no br... (more)

RRDTool-based Network Management Tool of Choice?

I've long been a fan of Tobi Oetiker's RRDTool.  It's fun to play with on its own, but it's also the basis for many open-source management platforms, and for some it's a component of a much larger platform.  Heck, it's everywhere...it's even baked into the BIG-IP performance graphs.  I've used it for many years and for many different purposes, but it intersected with my F5 world a few years back when I needed more granular views into the data than the BIG-IP graphs provided and my very expensive commercial tools didn't support the indexed mibs at the time.  My RRDTool front-end o... (more)

The ABCs of NSM - U is for Umbraco

Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM.  What's NSM you say?  We'll go with Network and System Management, but you could throw Security in there as well.  We'll work our way through the alphabet over  the next several weeks looking at  tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out there.   By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title  (I  couldn't for the life of me come up with one.) Today's letter U is for Umbraco, an open-source .NET based content management system.  There are no shortages of CMS platforms. However, thanks to ... (more)

Mr. “Persistently Different” Moving Over, Not On

The leagues of @dmacvittie followers are surely aware, but for the benefit of the rest of the community, I’d like to share that DevCentral’s own, Don MacVittie, has moved over to another team within the F5 family.  Fear not (or be more afraid, take your pick!) as Don will continue to display his wit and charm through his series of information blogs.  Don has been a consummate professional since I joined the team.  Even through his final days, which happened to coincide with the launch of the new DevCentral, he was intimately concerned with the quality of the product and worked t... (more)

Accessing TCP Options from iRules

I’ve written several articles on the TCP profile (click here) and enjoy digging into TCP.  It’s a beast, and I am constantly re-learning the inner workings.  Still etched in my visual memory map, however, is the TCP header format, shown in Figure 1 below. Since 9.0 was released, TCP payload data (that which comes after the header) has been consumable in iRules via the TCP::payload and the port information has been available in the contextual commands TCP::local_port/TCP::remote_port and of course TCP::client_port/TCP::server_port.  Options, however, have been inaccessible.  Ho... (more)