Jason Rahm

If you didn’t know, the DevCentral platform runs on DotNetNuke, the leading open source ASP.Net CMS. It’s a great development platform for turning out rich sites, and we’re excited to be hosting the next Seattle DNN User Group meeting next Wednesday, February 8th, beginning at 6p... (more)

It’s a crazy world out there. I ran (well, by “ran” I mean jogged slowly enough to pass the old ladies on the track) this morning at the YMCA, lifted weights for a little while, and then hit the elliptical for 20 minutes before heading home. My gym’s ellipticals have the Nike+ pa... (more)

A DevCentral user posted a question in the forums asking for verification of an attribute on the RamCacheKey structure. The maximum_responses attribute should be a long integer. With his C# code, the maximum_responses returned from his iControl call is always double the setting. ... (more)

Back in October, I attended a Security B-Sides event in Jefferson City (review here). One of the presenters (@bethayoung) talked about poisoning the internal DNS intentionally for known purveyors of all things bad. I indicated in my write-up that I’d be detailing an F5-based solu... (more)

iApps, introduced in v11, have a primary function in controlling the object creation and management for an application delivered by BIG-IP. As discussed previously, however, anything that can be accomplished in TMSH can be done in an iApp, so what better way to quickly generate c... (more)

F5 has been in the DNS business for quite some time, beginning with the 3-DNS GSLB product introduced in 1998. While steadily growing the GSLB market through product advances, the platform is incredibly feature rich now, offering far more than GSLB services. Some of the other ser... (more)

New in BIG-IP version 11.1 are iFiles, a feature that allows users to load files through tmsh or the GUI onto the BIG-IP which can be referenced from iRules. This has an immediate use case of supplanting several of our codeshare entries for sorry and/or maintenance pages delivere... (more)

George posted an excellent blog on hostname nomenclature a while back, but something we haven’t discussed much in this space is a naming convention for the BIG-IP configuration objects. Last week, DevCentral community user Deon posted a question on exactly that. Sometimes there a... (more)

No, not “us” F5, the F5 key on the keyboard. You know, the one you hit relentlessly to refresh the page (well, the one I hit relentlessly during NFL games to update my fantasy football stats). Anyway, I was perusing the forums today, trying to catch up from a week attending our v... (more)

Several months ago I wrote up the v10 formatting for internal and external datagroups: iRules Data Group Formatting Rules. In v11, however, there is a change to the format of the internal data group and the data group reference to external class files (the formatting in the exter... (more)

F5er and DevCentral member natty76 wrote a few iRules a while back on interactive TLS session starting on the SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 protocols. A lot of the iRules can be understood from a flow perspective by reading the iRule top to bottom. This is not the case for these iRules. I... (more)

Last Friday I attended my first BSides event in Missouri’s capitol (literally in the capitol building!) Jefferson City. The BSides community exists to bring fellow security practitioners together to present and participate in a small-scale environment that encourages collaboratio... (more)

In Part 1, I configured a full Webtop in APM with a static RDP host. In Part 2 ,I modified that configuration to allow users to specify their RDP destination. In this article, I’ll make a couple changes to the final configuration in Part 2 to have the last hostname “remembered” a... (more)

In the first article in this series, I configured a full Webtop in APM with a static RDP host.  In this article, I’ll make some changes to the original configuration to allow users to specify an RDP host destination. Modify the Access Policy Immediately after the active directory ... (more)

I wrote an article several months back on auto-launching Remote Desktop sessions with APM.  With the introduction of BIG-IP APM v11, there is a new built-in capability to support a full webtop.  This means that server, desktop, or other resources can be placed on the webtop for u... (more)

This article will cover a simple access policy that when completed will lock out a user using BIG-IP Access Policy Manager.  Start by making an access policy with the Device Wizard. Since I just want to make a quick and easy example, I’ll be using the fourth radio option, Web App... (more)

F5er and DevCentral community member ystephie is back with another great solution (check out her first solution here: BIG-IP APM Customized Logon Page), this time tackling brute force attacks utilizing customizations with the BIG-IP Access Policy Manager.  This solution requires ... (more)

Beginning with BIG-IP version 11, the idea of templates has not only changed in amazing and powerful ways, it has been extended to be far more than just templates.  The replacement for templates is called iAppTM.  But to call the iAppTM just a template would be woefully inaccurat... (more)

F5er and DevCentral community member ystephie is back with another great solution (check out her first solution here: BIG-IP APM Customized Logon Page), this time tackling brute force attacks utilizing customizations with the BIG-IP Access Policy Manager.  This solution requires ... (more)

I covered the Tcl scan command back in the iRules 101 – #16 – Parsing Strings with the TCL Scan Command, but this example (by Hoolio, who else?) was too good not to share with the community. The request involved parsing a log entry as efficiently as possible.  The log entry is as... (more)