Category: F5 Networks

F5 Networks

Create a RADIUS Accounting-Response packet using iRules

JD Allen,

UPDATE:  (Jan 2020) F5 has revised the DevCentral website, so the links below don’t work anymore. If you do look and find these older posts on DevCentral, please send me the update links!  Thanks! Several years ago when I worked at F5 Networks, I posted an iRule up on F5’s DevCentral website about how to Create a proper RADIUS Accounting-Response packet in iRules, and I’m glad it still gets comments today!  I also did a post about How to decode the five different data types in a RADIUS packet.

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F5 Networks

Hexdump for iRules

JD Allen,

There are times when you really would like to get a dump of a packet’s binary payload from within iRules, and dump it in a log file. This is very helpful for checking not only an incoming packet’s payload, but also any payloads you may be generating so you can check to see if the fields are lined up, values are correct, etc.  I’ve used hexdump functions for years in things like Perl and Python, but I could not find anything similar for iRules, so I wrote one. Notice that…

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F5 Networks

Why F5’s BIG-IP?

JD Allen,

BIG-IP has anywhere from a 60% to a 25% market share in the “ADC” (Application Delivery Controller …AKA “Load Balancer”), depending on who you talk to. Folks like Seeking Alpha question if F5 Networks is the next Cisco, given their market share and financial outlooks.  Cisco got out of the Load Balancer market, most likely because they felt they could not compete with F5. So why would you use an F5 BIG-IP product? In some cases, you would not!  If all you need to do is simple round-robin load balancing…

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