F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager ( LTM ) - Scripting It, Baby

I've made yet more headway with this fascinating product.

I'd referenced this excellent post: -

which, in part, included the necessary F5 commands, using the tmsh utility, to set up a pair of network interfaces, some IP addresses and a default route: -

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However, I wanted to go further - I wanted to script the configuration of the necessary components: -

HTTPS Health Monitor

Node

Virtual Server

to allow the F5 to do its job of (a) monitoring a downstream instance of IBM HTTP Server and (b) allow me to have IHS listening on port 8443 whilst the F5 receives traffic on port 443.

This is my IHS configuration, for the record: -

and this is what I did on the F5 LTM: -

This is the component that monitors the downstream IHS, so needs to "know" the HTTPS ciphers being used and the port. Note that, in Unix-land, port 8443 is "known" as pcsync-https ( just check /etc/services ) which is an alias for port 8443.

The Monitor also needs to send a well-formed HTTP/1.1 request, and wait for a proper HTTP response code e.g. 200 OK.

The node ( we typically have more than one ) refers to the downstream IHS box, specifically in terms of it's IP address or hostname

This is where the Monitor and the Node are brought together

This represents the service that the LTM offers to the client, which is where the magic "mapping" between the IHS port of 8443 and the exposed port of 443 happens

I think this is implicit, but it never hurts to do it :-)

Having run all of that, which takes about 5 seconds, I have a nice network map: -

an active pool: -

a working node: -

and a happy virtual server: -

More importantly, I can hit IHS directly: -

*AND* via the LTM: -

Note that, in the latter case, the connection is on port 443, which the browser automatically hides :-)

So I've still got some SSL certificate stuff to do, especially if I want to have the F5 use Mutual Authentication ( aka Client Authentication ) to the IHS box, but that's for another day ….