DevCentral Top5 12/03/2010
After another few blazingly fast weeks in the DevCentral world, I’m back with another injection of wicked cool topics from DC land. From upgrades to slick iRules to Australian escapades, to holidays, there has been much afoot as always, and there is much goodness to report on. With that, let’s get right to this week’s Top 5:
SSL Profiles Part 3: Certificate Chain Implementation
Jason is three parts into his amazing SSL Profiles series already, and I’m a major fan. In this series he’s tearing open the protocol and describing exactly how it works, what to expect, how to tune for it, and perhaps most importantly how to configure and administer your F5 systems to deal with it effectively. This “from the ground up” approach is not only extremely helpful and educational, it’s inspiring. Keep an eye out for more articles from Jason (and I’m wagering the rest of the team) in this killer style. Go, read, prosper.
iControl 101 #23 – Module Resource Provisioning
Up to his usual iControl tricks, Joe walks you through a less-known but plenty cool BIG-IP feature: Module Resource Provisioning. “But what is Module Resource Provisioning” you ask? Well, it’s the ability to change the allocation of resources given to each of the modules running on your F5 device. Say you want to give that ASM module a little more memory, or convince WA to use a little less disk space…this how you can do just that. And with Joe’s help, you can do it via iControl in a snap. A system that can automatically scale the resources allocated to suit the needs of a given application (module, in this case) … if only there were a name for that. Something stretchy or fluffy or…something.
Mitigating Slow HTTP Post DDoS Attacks With iRules – Follow-up
George posted an update to the already very cool iRule he shared last month to thwart incoming Slow Post attacks. With this update he shared a couple of tweaks built into the iRule by the community and the man himself, hoolio, to work around a couple gotchas in the original example. This is still a sweet fix for a possibly disastrous attack, but now with more hawesome! So take a look for yourself, especially if you’re already using the older version.
Most Human Viruses are obvious
In this interesting comparison between a common cold and a computer virus Don talks about one very important difference between the two: visibility. Computer viruses are, many times, something that you can’t lay your eyes on at all until it’s far too late. By the time the first symptom is displayed, your entire system (or network) is infected. The CPU spiking like that isn’t a good thing, chief, and it means you’re late to the party trying to stop the problem. Much like any illness, solving symptoms of the problem won’t solve the core of the issue, but unlike humans that tend to remedy themselves when given enough rest, computers demand much more attention, not to mention attention to detail. Take a read and give it some thought, it’s worth a few minutes of pondering for sure.
The Database Tier is Not Elastic
This article hits close to home for plenty of reasons. I’ve been working with DBs for quite some time, as has anyone that’s been dealing with applications for a while. I’ve also been dealing with distributed applications on the web in one manner or another for quite a while. Trying to deal with both of those concepts, databases and distributed applications, working together can be quite a headache. Lori delves into why, and puts things into perspective when talking about the cloud as well as just internally distributed apps. I agree with her general slant: Until we can truly distribute the DB layer, we’re always going to have a bottleneck. It’s an interesting one to start thinking about. This one was a good read and still has me churning on how we can help deal with that, and what the industry at large is going to do down this avenue.
Well there it is, your DevCentral Top5 for the week. I’ll be back next week (yes, actually next week, as long as there are now freak occurrences of snow, holidays, illnesses, last minute international trips, etc.) with more awesome DC content for your enjoyment. Until then, keep browsing and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions, comments or feedback.
#Colin