We're all familiar with HTTP redirects. Everyone's seen one occur either via a meta refresh or at the server level. This is something that's become common place. But what about other protocols? How do I do something similar with an FTP connection, or a UDP transmission?

With iRules, it's easy.

What's more, is that you have even more granular control than just “send all requests for domain x to domain y”. That would be easy, especially at the DNS level, which is where GTM does the heavy lifting. With iRules on GTM, you can create logic such as, “When a DNS request comes in from a given range of IP addresses or subnets, if the request is for a host that is or contains one of the words/hosts in classA, dynamically determine where to send the request, based off of information in that class, and return the appropriate cname to the client”

Still with me? Good. I know it sounds complicated, but it's possible, and even relatively easy, with iRules.

Take a look:

class ip_list {
  "192.168.0.0"
  "172.27.0.0"
}

class host_list {
  "maindomain.com region1.maindomain.com"
  "someotherdomain.com specialcname.someotherdomain.com"
  “badsearchterm warning.maindomain.com”
}

rule cnameMatch {
  when DNS_REQUEST {
    set newCname [findclass [GTM::rrname] contains $::host_list " "]
    if { [string length $newCname] > 1 } {
      if{ [IP::addr [matchclass "[IP::client_addr]/24" equals $::ip_list] ] > 0 } {
        use cname $newCname
      }
    }
  }
}

And that's just one example, it just touches on the new power this gives you over your network, and more importantly, over the client experience.

With a couple of small tweaks, you could do many other interesting things with a rule like this one. Things like request prioritization, abuse protection by routing bad users/networks to certain pools, etc. are all just a couple of modifications away.

GTM and iRules allowing intelligent redirection for most protocols