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Shapa_83914's avatar
Shapa_83914
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Aug 06, 2008

geoip (Continent, Country) WideIP pool selection trouble

Hello

 

 

It looks like (at least in 9.4.5) the pool selection rule based on Continent / Country is simply not working...

 

 

When i'm trying to set topology rule manually by entering IP subnet's - everything works fine.

 

 

A bit more detailed:

 

 

Two datacentres (US- Nap and EU - Ttc)

 

 

Test topology rule "Continent is North America - DC is Nap, Continent is Europe - DC is Ttc"

 

 

WideIP with two pools (each contains only servers from one DC)

 

 

When i'm trying to resolve the domain - i'm always got round-robin ("rotated") answers - one by one from each pool.

 

 

In case i'll add the topology rule with an IP address (from which i'm doing all tests - it is 207.244.175.0/24) - everything is starting to work immediately (sure, only for hosts within this network)

 

 

It looks like something is broken inside of the software...

 

 

There is no way to see the database (it would be really nice to have an option to load geoip database from the maxmind for example)

 

 

So, what should i do?

 

Geoip support - this is the ONLY one reason why we bought big-ip appliances (they are quite pricey - more than 200.000$)

 

 

config
design

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  • hooleylist's avatar
    hooleylist
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Aug 26, 2008
    If you're getting multiple IP's in the answer, it sounds like the answer is coming from BIND. The whole idea behind GTM is to provide only a single IP response. If you haven't already, you could open a case with F5 Support and ask for help in troubleshooting this issue.

     

     

    Aaron
  • Shapa_83914's avatar
    Shapa_83914
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Aug 26, 2008
    In fact, the trouble is already investigated by PD

     

     

    There are two tricks / workarounds, which are not mentioned in the documentation (and that's really bad)

     

     

    1) Geo Topology load balance is not working for a destination datacentre within the WideIP (for pools load balance), but works for a region which consist of pools in the required datacentres

     

    2) There are tree quite a bad troubles in the big-ip software (CR already opened, devteam is working under the fix) regarding the RTT and GeoIP features (IANA database which is used in Topology is really outdated and works far from well)
  • Shapa_83914's avatar
    Shapa_83914
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Aug 26, 2008

    Posted By hoolio on 08/26/2008 9:31 AM

     

     

    If you're getting multiple IP's in the answer, it sounds like the answer is coming from BIND.

     

     

    Aaron

     

     

     

     

    That's wrong, you can easily configure to have multiple answers (up to 8) in the pool configuration. For sure, requests are not going to the bind...
  • Shapa_83914's avatar
    Shapa_83914
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Aug 26, 2008

    Posted By hoolio on 08/26/2008 10:33 AM

     

    The default is one. I'm not sure how it would work if you give multiple IP addresses and you're trying to persist clients or LDNS to the same server. But I guess not every implementation requires persistence.

     

     

    Aaron

     

     

     

     

    Yes, in our situation the persistence is not required - we've got proper software, which is completely independent from the persistence.

     

     

    BTW, it is quite easy to implement (in some cases at least) - just to return always the same IP's list... Cisco GSS for example doing that such way... (unfortunately, there are really small amount features that works properly with GSS)