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Thomas_Klausen_'s avatar
Thomas_Klausen_
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 03, 2017

Using an HTTP monitor without DNS lookup

Greetings.

 

I have run into an interesting problem... I have an internal F5 LTM configured with a VIP that serves internal clients only. To check on the pool members' health, I use the following GET command:

 

"GET http://appname.companyname.com/authentication.GetServerstatus/appname \r\n", where "appname.companyname.com" resolves to an internal IP address (10.x.x.x).

 

I am checking for an "OK" in the response, and things are working great.

 

Now the bad news: We need to expose the application to external users. So I build an external-facing VIP with a non-RFC1918 IP address, copy over the settings to our external-facing F5, and it mostly works - but the application is advertised externally with the same FQDN. When the external F5 looks up "appname.companyname.com" it goes via the management IP address, and I get the internal IP address.

 

Can I manually configure an IP address in the monitor? Or is there a smarter trick?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

application delivery
BIG-IP
LTM

4 Replies

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  • JG's avatar
    JG
    Icon for Cumulonimbus rankCumulonimbus
    May 03, 2017

    Why do you need to provide an absolute target URI in a monitor? Is your backend server a proxy?

     

    It would help clear things up if you share your virtual server and pool configuration.

     

  • rob_carr's avatar
    rob_carr
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    May 03, 2017

    You can use the alias address setting to specify the address being checked by your monitor.

     

  • JG's avatar
    JG
    Icon for Cumulonimbus rankCumulonimbus
    May 03, 2017

    You could do this with an external monitor, such as below:

    !/bin/sh

 these arguments supplied automatically for all external pingers:
 $1 = IP (::ffff:nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn notation or hostname)
 $2 = port (decimal, host byte order)
 $3 and higher = additional arguments
 
 $MONITOR_NAME = name of the monitor
 
 In this sample script, $3 is the regular expression


 Name of the pidfile
pidfile="/var/run/$MONITOR_NAME.$1..$2.pid"

 Send signal to the process group to kill our former self and any children 
 as external monitors are run with SIGHUP blocked
if [ -f $pidfile ]
then
   kill -9 -`cat $pidfile` > /dev/null 2>&1
fi

echo "$$" > $pidfile

 Remove the IPv6/IPv4 compatibility prefix 
node_ip=`echo $1 | sed 's/::ffff://'`

 Using the nc utility to get data from the server. 
 Search the data received for the expected expression.
echo "GET /" | /usr/bin/nc $node_ip $2 2> /dev/null | grep -E -i $3 > /dev/null

echo -e "GET http://appname.companyname.com/authentication.GetServerstatus/appname HTTP/1.0\n\n" | /usr/bin/nc -s ext.ip.addr.on.f5 appname.companyname.com 80 | grep "my expected return string" > /dev/null 2>&1

status=$?
if [ $status -eq 0 ]
then
 Remove the pidfile before the script echoes anything to stdout and is killed by bigd      
    rm -f $pidfile
    echo "up"
fi

 Remove the pidfile before the script ends
rm -f $pidfile

    [Untested].

    Replace "ext.ip.addr.on.f5" with a public IP address on your F5 system.

  • Stanislas_Piro2's avatar
    Stanislas_Piro2
    Icon for Cumulonimbus rankCumulonimbus
    May 03, 2017

    Hi,

    I think you misunderstood monitor configuration

    the 

    Send string
    is never interpreted by LTM to resolve hostname.

    The monitor open a TCP connection to pool member address and pool member port (or alias address / port is configured)

    after TCP handshake, the BigIP send the send string as is.

    when server respond, it parse the whole response including HTTP headers, if receive string matches, it mark the pool member up and close TCP connection.

    if you want to monitor server with URL 

    http://appname.companyname.com/authentication.GetServerstatus/appname
    , the monitor send string must be :

    GET /authentication.GetServerstatus/appname HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: appname.companyname.com\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n