Blurred Visions

I was working on a great problem this week where a somewhat old application was performing HTTP 0.9 compliant GET requests that were simply being ignored by the apache server we serving files from (an odd thing to be sure, and I am not convinced that the issue didn't have more to it than just the Client / Server aspects of the equation..) but anyway, just as I was scratching my head at what to do to try to shoehorn this system in, it dawned on me... We had some of the worlds most flexible web server munging devices on the planet in our hands... F5 LTM and ASMs... I had been looking for a reason to get my hands dirty on some iRules(after having heard so many iRule fan-boys prattling on...) So I signed up and logged into they DevCentral site and took a look..

The first thing that struck me straight away was the community spirit in this place... People sharing solutions and ideas left right and centre.. The second, just about every problem that I have had with windows (and other) web servers / web apps over the last 3 years, someone has fixed with an iRule somewhere... And the solutions are there, ready to be pasted and customised...

I am starting to form a new philosophy... and that is this: "Every system design should have an F5 LTM somewhere... you will NEVER know when it might save your a**!!!"

Anyway, now that I have looked into it more closely, I might even be able to get rid of a web server altogether and several reasonably annoying cron jobs if I manage to get the ASM doing what I need it to in an iRule...