DevCentral's Featured Member for July - Rhazi Youssef

Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and our Featured Series gives you some insight on some of our most active folks.

Rhazi Youssef has been a very active DevCentral member since 2012 and the third engineer we've featured from e-Xpert Solutions SA. Initially Rhazi was a bit reluctant to participate as he's a quiet, humble guy and we're thrilled that he's DevCentral's Featured Member for July!
Let's learn a bit more about Rhazi.

DevCentral: Please explain to the DevCentral community a little about yourself, what you do and why it’s important.

Rhazi: I’m a security engineer since 2009 working in Geneva (Switzerland), a region with several security projects involving F5 BIG-IP (GTM, LTM, ASM, APM). My interest began early when I started and installed several security equipment like Mail relay, FW, SIEM&SEM, web proxy… 

But I admit that my job became more interesting when I started to approach the application part. I am talking about WAF (ASM), perimeter security (APM), LTM (LB, optimization,)… 

I immediately bonded with this product since it is very rich, complete and scalable with its time. It is for this reason that I invested heavily on this product by passing for example all my certificates which gives me today the title of “Security Solution Expert” (401).

DC: You are a very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

RY: First off, like everyone else I admit that Devcentral has already allowed me to get out of trouble and not just once, and I thank the community for this. The DevCentral community is very much involved in sharing, helping and informing members. This work done by the community helped me a lot in my work (I upgraded my skills) so I think it is normal for me to give back to the community that helped me...and offer advice that will help with experience and knowledge the community to move forward.
My investment in the community is even easier since F5 is a product that is very important to me. 

Today I work primarily on F5 BIG-IP (APM, ASM, LTM, GTM, WebSafe) which allows me to have an important experience on the potential problems that one can meet during a deployment, so it's the least of the things to help the community when I can.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

RY: These last 6 years I worked mainly on F5, I had the chance to work with some very great customers that I cannot mention :-). I deployed all types of hardware until VIPRION. And today I work on almost all of the BIG-IP modules (ASM, APM, LTM, GTM, VCMP, LC, WebSafe). 

The advantage with F5 is that you cannot get tired of this product. It is rich, complete and scalable. For example the APM that allowed me to meet the needs of our customers by going from the identity federation (SAML) to Oauth&OpenID connect. But still it's the same thing for ASM and other modules. We do not say it often enough but this product allows us to be up to date in terms of security; I'm talking about authentication protocols that the APM offers, different security methods carried by the ASM ... all these aspects allow us to maintain our level and to learn ...

DC: You are a Sr. Security Engineer with e-Xpert Solutions SA. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions?

RY: As everyone knows the job of Security Engineer is not easy. We must manage several clients, several projects, manage customer support, communicate with clients (vulnerabilities, news), schedule management, project tracking,... 

So every morning I spend quite some time to manage my emails, my calendar and answer to my customers. I am registered to F5 RSS feed, which keep me updated on CVE, I also follow many f5 webinars (I usually watch them later when they are online).
At e-Xpert solutions I am product manager of F5 solution, so I have to inform my colleagues about vulnerabilities or any new features, I must also regularly write news that we publish on our website. The other PMs do the same thing with their own products which also allows me to be informed about the other products of our portfolio. 

During my working day I connect regularly to DevCentral when I have some time to help or learn about some interesting topics. For me, helping the community is not binding. On the contrary, certain questions allow us to update ourselves on certain subjects and to exchange on our different points of view. 

I finished my work day in the evening by doing a small check of my mails and a pass on my usual information sites which included DevCentral. I almost forgot I work out every 3 days and I try to run at least every 2 days (no excuse for gym time!). 

If you are interested, here is the website of the company in which I evolve: https://www.e-xpertsolutions.com/

DC: You have a number of F5 Certifications. Why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career?

RY: 8 months ago I had my last certification “Security Solution Expert” (401). Having all these certifications was very important to me. First of all in order to guarantee a high level of expertise to our customer. Moreover this certification process obliges us to study and consequently to update us on the different modules. 

These certifications are like a quality label, our customers appreciate when the engineers who intervene has the higher level of certification. 

Moreover with the experience that I have, I think that the passage of these certifications allow us to have a richer view of the product and consequently to propose to our customers the best possible alternatives according to their needs.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

RY: DC allowed me several times to solve the different problems I encountered. Things that seem simple to me today but that was not at the time I posted them and caused me quite some problems (Kerberos delegation, Kerberos authentication, Sideband, DDOS using iRule with session table …). 

I remember that I had to set up a perimeter of security to protect an application using the APM (I know it looks pretty simple). But I realized that the application was contextual (Web and JNLP) and that the APM session cookies were not propagated on to other contexts, so JNLP part could not connect. 

I will not go into the technical details but I had to create an iRule that used a table of correspondence between the cookie APM and the JNLP JSessionID that I stocked in a table session. Later I made an SSO on the backend application using the sideband (SSO profiles APM was not suitable). DC allowed me to build my iRule and sincerely without DC I would have had a lot of trouble and it would have taken me took a lot of time. And lastly DC allowed me to set up a fakeadfs using iRulesLX (and without DC, I do not think I could have done it alone).

DC: Finally, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

RY: When I was little and did not have school I spent my whole day on the football fields. I could play for 6 hours of suites without stopping. I loved football and I still do. So as you guessed I wanted to become a professional. But reality has taken over the dreams. Growing up I discovered computer science I started to build/dismantle my pc to add ram, change the hard drive, buy new graphics card for games... and little by little, I ended up in IT and I really do not regret it, but I admit that if I could have had the career of Ronaldo and also his salary I would not have mind either.

Thanks Rhazi!
Check out all of Rhazi's DevCentral contributions, connect on LinkedIn and follow e-xpert Solutions on LinkedIn.

If there is a DevCentral member you think should be featured, let us know in the comments section!

DevCentral's Featured Member for June - Jie Gao

Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and our Featured Series gives you some insight on some of our most active folks.

Jie Gao is a very active contributor on DevCentral since 2012 and has been on a roll recently answering questions about monitoring, URI redirects, SSL and many others. We're excited to name Jie as our Featured Member for June!

Let's learn a bit more about Jai.

DevCentral: please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it’s important.

Jie Gao: I am a system administrator in the University of Sydney and have been in the IT profession for over 20 years. I became an F5 administrator from "the other side" with a background in the open source, *nix system administration, system integration, Web application development, etc., some 7 years ago. I wanted to help bridge the great divide between networking and application through the use of F5. Upon reflection, I'm not sure I made much of a difference. :-(  Off work, I immerse myself listening to music on my Hi-Fi.

DC: You are very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

JG: Like many others here, I got on DevCentral initially to find a solution to a specific problem. I stayed on to learn more, to find out what more I can do and do better in my work. It is beneficial to know what issues other people are encountering, issues that might potentially affect my work later as well. If there is a software issue, then I could learn about it here early before it hits us, saving us from pulling our hairs out trying to figure out the puzzle. There are also solutions there that we could be asked to provide at work at the drop of a hat.

It feels good to be able to help people out. Sometimes it is even easier and more satisfying to help a total stranger than someone you already know. At the same time, it is also a good opportunity to learn how to answer a question properly - there are great minds and hands on DevCentral and I have learnt a great deal from them. I hope I have not provided too many incorrect/half-cooked answers! F5 staff tend to provide a complete, authoritative answer citing official documentation. Sometimes it might also be better to help people help themselves if they are not in a great hurry. Through answering questions, I have also learnt how to ask questions properly as well. 

All said, DevCentral is an invaluable site of knowledge, solutions, and advice (and silly questions - including mine), where F5 administrators and solution designers, or really anyone, can find a quick answer to an F5-related issue in hand, or a pointer to a resource for further exploration. Great resource.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

JG: The University has been using the BIG-IP LTM/APM/GTM/ASM modules for various application services for many years, and I have been with it all along. However, I prefer to regard myself a generalist, although I spent most of my time on F5 at work. I like programming and code in a few languages, and I did my first Ruby script while answering a question about iControlREST on DevCentral. :-)

DC: You are a Senior Network Designer at University of Sydney. Can you describe your typical workday and how you manage work/life balance?

JG: My typical workday starts with e-mail processing, browsing F5 Support's New Updates, and checking into DevCentral for a look, in that order. Home is wherever I am. All my hobbies/activities are suitably for a single soul. So I have got the balance holistically right. ;-)

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

JG: A few years ago I had a challenge, probably not the biggest but nonetheless an interesting one, to host a DNS split-view for a part of the organization as a matter of emergency. I found some useful code examples as well as relevant documentation on DevCentral and did it all in an iRule!

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

JG: The very first dream I recall I had as a toddler was to be a proud driver of a red-milky colored bus that thrummed through the center of Beijing. I have since had many other dreams, but I never did realize my first one.

Thanks Jie! Check out all of Jie's DevCentral contributions and follow The University of Sydney on Twitter.


If there is a DevCentral member you think should be featured, let us know in the comments section!

DevCentral's Featured Member for February - Lee Sutcliffe

After a brief hiatus for the New Year, we're kicking off the 2018 Featured Member series with a new DevCentral MVP: MrPlastic, Lee Sutcliffe. Like Kevin this past December, Lee does a great job with the opening question, so we'll let him tell his story. A long-time DevCentral member and always engaged with the community, Lee Sutcliffe is DevCentral's Featured Member for February 2018. Congrats Lee!

DevCentral: First, please explain to the DevCentral community a little about yourself, what you do and why it’s important.

Lee Sutcliffe: I guess always enjoyed fixing and building things, taking things apart to see how they worked (admittedly, not always being able to put them back together again). From a young age, my younger brother would design something on paper and I’d have to build it with Lego. So it comes as no surprise that he is now an Architect and I’m an Engineer (of sorts). 

My first IT job was a sandwich placement; after two years of University you spend a year working in Industry before going back to complete your final year. The idea being, when you graduate you already have some level of experience in the real world as well as your degree to help you get on the job ladder. 

My placement was at a local high school as an ICT Technician, doing anything from network cabling to NT4-Windows 2000 migrations. 

After going back to University and graduating I spent a year being a typical long haired hedonistic backpacker commonly known as hippie before finally deciding I should stop enjoying life and go earn some money for a change. 

Since then worked in another high school as a Network Manager for three years before landing a job in 2009 with Callcredit, a credit reference agency in Leeds UK. It was here where I really cut my teeth and was able to develop my career as a network engineer using Cisco, F5 and Check Point technologies amongst others. 

I left the safety permanent employment in 2013 to become a freelance contractor, working for a variety of clients, mostly in the financial sector to where I find myself today at Lloyds Banking Group.

DC: You are a very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

LS: DevCentral always is my first port of call for anything I don’t know straight away. Members of the community have really helped me out over the years, especially in the early part of my career. I get a sense of satisfaction helping others and it’s important to give something back. For fear of sounding too altruistic, it is also a good way to keeping up to date and refreshing old skills, as well as learning new ones.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

LS: Like a lot of people BIG-IP LTM is my bread and butter and coming from a comms background it’s definitely the product I’m most familiar with, especially given its wide adoption. However, I have also worked a lot with GTM, APM and AFM, at the moment I’m working exclusively with iRules. I’m just starting to look into iRules LX which is a really interesting area.

DC: You are a F5 Consultant at Lloyds Banking Group. Can you describe your typical workday and how you manage work/life balance?

LS: I have been working as a contractor at LBG since July last year. I work within a team that are responsible for the maintenance and development of iRules used within the Bank, mainly for the online banking platform. Without disclosing too much, the use of iRules are vast, easily the most comprehensive I’ve seen anywhere, with custom proc libraries and in-house certificate management APIs to name but a few. For all intents and purposes, it’s a developer role which had quite a steep learning curve but I’m enjoying the challenges. Work life balance can be tricky, mainly because I work away in London during the week and home is over 300km away which means weekends can become a bit rushed and end too quickly.

DC: You have many F5 Certifications including Technology Specialist (LTM) certifications. Why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career?

LS: Having F5 certifications have certainly helped me align my career down a more specific F5 route. They haven’t been plagued by brain dumps so the certifications actually mean something. I also like how the exams are written, you can’t learn parrot fashion and you have to have had hands on experience working with the technology. I’d like to sit my 401 exam eventually but my limited ASM knowledge is currently preventing me getting all four CTS certificates – something I’m keen to resolve!

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

LS: I think my biggest BIG-IP challenge has been the adjustment to my current role. To go from a guy who ‘did wires’ to writing code for a living was a challenge, especially in the first couple of months. My first project at Lloyds was to develop a framework for a micro service which involved multiple separate iRules, hundreds of lines of code for session management and encryption services. However, one of my most memorable challenges was earlier on in my career and was actually quite simple, I do remember feeling particularly pleased with the solution. I had to create a monitor for a webmethod, at the time the required version of NTLM wasn’t supported as standard, I was racking my brains for ages when someone on DevCentral suggested I could use cURL and an external monitor. So I had to use tcpdump to capture the request, rebuild the XML using cURL, test the result then and use an external monitor to check the service. I remember how impressed I was, how customizable the product was and if it didn’t do it out of the box, there’s usually a way to do what you need.

DC: Could you also give the backstory to Mr. Plastic if there is one?

LS: As for my DevCentral handle; MrPlastic well that may take some explaining! I used to produce a form of hard, aggressive dance music called Breakcore under the pseudonym Monster Plastic and ran a club night in Leeds, with my brother where we played our music and booked guest DJs and producers. It was a mixture of jungle, hardcore, gabber and heavy breaks – your mother wouldn’t approve! Monster Plastic soon developed into Lee Plastic. As for the Mr? I don’t know, maybe I just got married and settled down!

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

LS: I’d like to be able to work outside, I’m a keen rock climber and mountaineer and working in London doesn’t lend its self to getting out as much as I’d like. So I’d probably like to work as a climbing and mountaineering instructor. When I was younger I wanted to pilot search and rescue helicopters for the Royal Air Force but after university I was still enjoying partying too much and wasn’t quite ready for a twelve-year commission!

Thanks Lee! Check out all of Lee's DevCentral contributions, connect with him on LinkedIn and visit Lloyds Banking Group or follow on Twitter.

DevCentral's Featured Member for December - Kevin Davies

When we prepare for our Featured Member series, I typically send out a questionnaire and the DevCentral member writes out their answers. With the opening question I'll do a bit of editing and use that for the intro. This month however, airloom's Kevin Davies did such a great job with the opening, I decided to simply let him tell his story. A long-time DevCentral member and always engaged with the community, Kevin Davies is DevCentral's Featured Member to close out 2017. Congrats Kevin!

DevCentral: First, please explain to the DevCentral community a little about yourself, what you do and why it’s important.

Kevin: I suppose my interest in technology came from a desire to know how things work. My first job in computers was doing exactly that, building them at a small computer store in Brisbane. I have always been technical, being the pioneer in my family I immediately saw the potential they would bring and how it might shape the world…

I remember a quiet night alone in the office struggling to understand SCO Unix, as I’d come from a MS-DOS background. Yet I persisted, and using the SLIP protocol with static IP addressing, I successfully connected our business to the University, so we could receive email. This was back when Universities were connected globally and world wide web as we know it today, did not exist… yet.

My next role was to join an ISP as a help desk guy. Always in search of more knowledge, I figured the quickest way to get it was to immerse myself. Dealing with 10,000 users you rapidly discover the problems people are faced with as they try to get a handle on these things called modems! It was a great experience, and I attained my CCNA certification there. By the time I left three and a half years later, I was literally running the network.
Then I joined Unisys in a security role, to further expand my knowledge of firewalls and the way they operated. This required a deeper understanding of protocols, there were some very interesting problems you would come across. I lived for those moments and always found troubleshooting something I really enjoyed. During this job I transitioned from a Brisbane country town to Sydney the big city.
After various contracts and the GFC, I ended up at CSC doing more security, this time Checkpoint firewalls. It was here that I worked with my first BIG-IP. A load balancer, I mean what’s there to learn I thought? You send traffic here, you send traffic there… how little did I know. It wasn’t until I joined Red Education doing professional services that I came to understand the true capability of the device. Where I learned iRules provide customers with tremendous flexibility and iApps, API and automation toolsets make these devices scale and deploy in hybrid environments.
Now I work for airloom, the #1 F5 engineering partner in A/NZ, APJ and joint #1 globally providing solutions that no-one else could deliver. My first week at airloom I sat my 401 exams. My second week I was learning a completely new product. The third was sitting down with customers. They have a consistently high level of expertise that is not found elsewhere in Australia. They recruit and maintain the best, to deliver the outcomes customers need. After eight years F5 experience I thought would arrive here at least on par with the guys within the team. I was wrong.

DC: You are a very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

KD: I’ve always enjoyed helping others, it’s part of my DNA being a consultant. It is why I have enjoyed being an instructor as well as doing professional services for the last eight years. I’ve found that giving back to the community that has helped me is my way of saying thank you. From an airloom perspective the team is entirely focused on helping customers being successful so giving is what we do day in and day out.

DC:Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

KD: I have enjoyed making the BIG-IP do magic for customers. It really is a powerful integration toolset in the right hands. Everyone needs to get traffic from A to B. With one of these the capability to add world class protection at any layer, multiple layers of authentication or even inspection becomes possible. That’s on top of providing high availability and redundancy for any application. Its level of detail and control is quite astonishing.

I’ve made stateless applications stateful, one protocol talk to another, the list goes on. My favorite has been iRules, I used to have a motto on the wall when I worked in one place for a few months… “iRules for breakfast, how many do you do?” That stateful piece was all written using iRules and saved the business over a million dollars in project costs whilst delivering projects quicker and with less errors. 

I have deployed nearly every product, my most recent has been migrating customers from legacy F5 physical appliances into virtualized appliances running vCMP. Instead of just running one BIG-IP they can have eight of them on a mid-range appliance. F5’s zero contention virtualization platform means customers can have the speed and the flexibility to provision BIG-IP’s with N dedicated processing cores.

One of my favorite F5 product modules is APM. The visual policy editor is a brilliant tool for building your own custom security policy and provides incredibly flexibility. The authentication point to end all authentication points… SAML, OAUTH, OTP, AD, Radius, Tacacs, DIY. You can roll your own N factor auth with built-in/external MFA and have all of it layered using SSO. It really is the authentication cornerstone of the products and is a joy to work with.

DC: You are a Distinguished Engineer at airloom. Can you describe your typical workday and how you manage work/life balance?

KD: On Monday’s I prepare for the weekly briefing, check outcomes from the previous week and start planning the day. Then tee myself up a list of things to do, including client meetings and begin preparation for them. These continue till the end of the day. I might be in the office one day, working remotely or both. We have no local infra except for a printer and wireless access points, everything we do is in the cloud. This means we are free to work from any location be it at home, office or customer site.

The role of an airloom Distinguished Engineer is a pretty awesome one, we report to our CTO Adrian (Nobby) Noblett who was the former F5 Solution Architect for APJ. Our role as DE’s is to help our client’s get the most out of their technology investments, however we are also given the creative license to develop new solutions we believe will help our clients. We have several goals to work towards on a regular basis, and they are not just about projects but also coming up with industry leading solutions no one else is across so we stay ahead of the curve and ensure our clients have access to the best solutions ahead of the entire market.

DC: You have a number of F5 Certifications including Technology Specialist (LTM) certifications. Why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career?

KD: I am certified in LTM, GTM, ASM, APM. I also just recently attained the Security Solutions Expert. F5 certifications are serious business. They provide assessment and recognition of technical skillset. This is valuable to airloom & valuable to my career and on top of my experience shows that someone is serious about maintaining their knowledge level on a product. I appreciate F5 are diligent about detecting and eradicating shortcuts as this maintains the value of the certification. The blueprints and study guide provided with each exam are highly relevant and far more than many other vendors provide to help professionals prepare themselves. From an airloom perspective it is a requirement that all DE’s are 401 level certified to hold the DE title at airloom, and we actually have the equal most number of 401’s in the world in our team!

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

KD: There have been many. The biggest was an iRule solution that a customer refused to implement as a black box solution! The data flow was deemed mission critical so they required on going monitoring. This meant writing another iRule to collect statistics. Then another to display them. The solution itself used about 100 subtables, the statistics around 1000 as it tracked not only the success or failure but all possible execution outcomes, effectively profiling the solution behavior per transaction.

This was then output not only as a html web page showing the effectiveness of the solution, but also available in XML format to be polled by a 3^rd party monitoring platform. Their monitoring dashboard had graphs for each transaction type showing its effectiveness over time. It seemed overkill at the time however over three weeks the effectiveness of the solution gradually tapered off from 98% to 0% and by that time we were furiously troubleshooting with F5 support. 

It turned out about 1 in 200,000 calls to a certain command would return an undocumented outcome. Once known the code was updated, the problem now was the BIG-IP contained hundreds of invalid table entries that never expire. Failing over was not a solution because the HA device maintained an identical copy through session table mirroring. The most effective solution involved a fourth and final iRule to iterate through every permutation and remove the invalid table entries.

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

KD: I think a tour guide. I love talking to people and seeing new things. I could probably travel for ten years and only see half what the world has to offer. Human beings are quite creative people and cultural differences produce an amazing diversity of ideas around the globe.

Thanks Kevin! Check out all of Kevin's DevCentral contributions, connect with him on LinkedIn and visit airloom or follow on Twitter.

Mitigate L7 DDoS with BIG-IP ASM

Today, let’s look at a couple ways to mitigate an application DDoS attack with BIG-IP ASM.

We’ve logged into a BIG-IP ASM and navigated to Security>DDoS Protection>DDoS Profiles. In the General Settings of Application Security, we’ll activate an application DoS iRule event.

We’ll click TPS-based Detection to see the temporarily lowered TPS thresholds to easily simulate an attack. Often, there are multiple mitigation methods that are sequentially applied as you can see with the Source IP settings.

We can also record traffic packet captures during attacks for post analysis.

When the user requests a web application proxied by BIG-IP ASM, ASM will create a unique identifier or a Device ID. ASM will inject JavaScript to register each client device. You can see X-Device-ID: at the bottom.

And JavaScript incapable clients never make it through.

Now that the unit is ready, let’s enable some packet capture and take a go at that damn vulnerable web application.

Path for the log files is /var/log/ or /shared/log/…the PCAP folder is empty so let’s see the action.

Attack commence in 3-2-1. Some quick refreshes should do as our thresholds are low.

The first mitigation is Client Side Integrity Defense. The system issues a client-side integrity challenge that consumes client computation resources and slows down the attack. Next is Built-in Captcha. The third mitigation is Rate Limiting…

..then if they’re still not listening, you can instantly transform into a Honeypot.

The logs below show the IP address and the type of mitigation technique deployed. First Integrity, then Captcha, then Rate Limiting, then Honeypot if they don't stop. The traffic you recorded will be found in the, now populated, PCAP folders.

Thanks to F5 SE Artiom Lichtenstein for the demo video.

ps

Related:

• Lightboard Lessons: What is DDoS?

DevCentral’s Featured Member for August – Piotr Lewandowski

Piotr Lewandowski has been working in IT for well over 20 years – and not really conscious decision to go this way – just blind luck. He started in the era without Internet…yes, not so long ago it was possible to live without Internet J…and IBM PC/XT computers. Thanks to self-learning he managed to work as DTP operator on Apple computers (the first in Poland at the time). However, he also had to manage all the other aspects of “network” so he turned into IT guy. Then he worked as CIO for quite a long time but when company started to grow, he figured out the corporate environment is not for him and switched to consulting on his own terms.

About 5 years ago, F5 gear popped up and he had to learn how to use it. It was challenging as he never was network pro – but turned out that it’s interesting and challenging so he’s still there and is DevCentral’s Featured Member for August!

DevCentral: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

Piotr: It’s a shame but I am still best in Load Balancing related part. I am struggling to improving in more trendy areas – security and AAA but it takes time. Especially security in the WAF area. It is so broad and fast moving that I have problem staying current. I am able to configure most all pieces of BIG-IP LTM and GTM features, but for ASM, APM and AFM it is still a bit of a challenge. 

I am not a programmer but during some projects I learned both iRules and iControl so I am comfortable with those. Lately I started to research iRulesLX – which seems very promising – but not a lot info about real life project can be found.
I’ve also dabbled a bit with BIG-IP/OpenStack topic and have a good idea how it works but still need to deploy in a production environment. 

Recently I decided to improve my skills in dynamic routing protocols (BGP, OSPF etc.) to be able to address DDoS related topics (RTBH, RHI, Anycast). Somewhat challenging but my lab is growing and I am starting to see some light in the tunnel - Polish proverb – don’t know if valid in English.

DC: You are a Technical Consultant at SoftwareDefined. Can you describe your typical workday?

Piotr: I am working for few businesses, right now my most active relations are with SoftwareDefined. To be honest, right now there is plenty of projects including some areas I am not so fluent, so most of my time is devoted to learning and testing. 

Most of my day is filled in with lab work – testing how BIG-IP works behind scenes (which is the only way I can be 100% sure that given implementation will work as expected); recreating different bizarre customer configs to find out how to implement/improve them; and “reverse engineering” BIG-IP features to figure out if impossible is possible. ;-) 

I also stay current with DevCentral stuff. 

There are of course days when it’s necessary to work directly with customer – explain how BIG-IP can be used, why it’s so great and how their life will be easier after buying few, especially VIPRIONs! 

Part of my tasks is a technical support for customers we are working with. Bright side is that we are working with ones that are pretty skillful in the BIG-IP area – so cases are interesting and challenging and always learning something new and useful

DC: You were a CIO right when the internet started to blossom in the mid-1990s thru the 2000s. What are some of the advancements that truly surprised you?

Piotr: Good catch! To be honest I barely remember how it was… but for sure not worse than it is now. 

I guess there are two main topics that I am amazed most. One you can surely call advancement, second is really mystery for me – you can call it advancement but…
Advancement is vast ocean of information out there. Right now – if you know what you are looking for and how to triage search results – one can find info he needs in few minutes. Even if I have no idea at all about given topic it’s always possible to find some starting point and proceed from there. That was not possible without Internet – sure you could call friend and try to find books but it would take ages – and there is no time for that nowadays. 

I do want to express that I love DevCentral (and I am honest here, not just trying to flatter). I know communities of few other big vendors and there is no comparison for my needs. I can’t recall situation when I was not able at least find clue that allowed me to resolve issue. There is so much valuable info and great people on DevCentral that it creates great value by itself! 

“Advancement.” I can’t understand is how easily people are sharing very private info on the Internet and at the same time how fiercely they are finding for their privacy – that is paradox I can’t figure out. 

I am dinosaur here, still prefer few good friends in real life that thousands of virtual friends out there. To be honest, for me social part of the Internet could not exist at all.
Most amazing progress (somehow for sure related to Internet) for me is Big Data, machine learning and AI. What is even more amazing is that those are seldom seen in networking/ADC area. All the networking protocols, security, LB and so on was designed with main goal – computer should be able to understand and use them – not humans. And computers are good at it – opposite to most humans. Share amount of data, speed of changes it is all making reaction by humans almost impossible.
So why still humans are doing all this mundane task of configuring, tuning and adjusting? For me, right direction is handing this all out to computers. Something like IoT. All should be based on intelligent entities that are aware about surrounding environment, can self-tune/reconfigure, self-protect, actively fight for resources and finally self-destroy. 

Even if that is scary and still far away there are areas that should be changed/improved. Simple example the BIG-IP courtyard – TCP optimization. This is very complicated and mundane task to adjust all those settings live. But device processing traffic has all data necessary to do that and understands this data better than most BIG-IP users ever can.
Another, maybe not so obvious area is why network is not aware about business data. Not all traffic is of the same value for business so network/ADC should actively readjust configuration based on business data. It’s is totally possible when whole IT infrastructure works as one conscious, intelligent organism but impossible to be done in real time by humans.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

Piotr: Each new implementation is challenge, but I guess I can recall two that almost make me fall to my knees: 

OpenStack and BIG-IP integration – plenty of new technologies I never touched before. Steep learning curve and relatively small amount of good quality info (it was a year ago, I am pretty sure now it’s much better). 

“Reverse engineering” of BIG-IP APM/SWG to figure out if proxy chaining is possible (especially for HTTPS) or not. Here I had to really harness my iRules skills. Thanks to that, I was able to figure out how things work behind scenes and unfortunately find out that task is impossible to implement in manageable way – to be honest even with v13.0.0 seems to be impossible.

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

Piotr: Nothing related to IT. I am not saying it’s not fun but… I guess I would try to be archeologist, revealing secrets of the past always thrilled my mind. Probably not in the human past area, rather few dozen million years back when dinosaurs ruled Earth. I was always curious what would happen if big impact would not happen. And finally this job seems to allow to visit really distant and mysterious parts of the world. 

Thanks Niels! Check out all of Piotr' DevCentral contributions, connect with him on LinkedIn and visit SoftwareDefined.

DevCentral’s Featured Member for July – Vosko Networking’s Niels van Sluis

For almost two years Niels van Sluis has worked as a Security Engineer for Vosko Networking. Vosko's security team focuses on supporting security solutions from various vendors like F5, Check Point, Cisco and RSA. Niels focuses is on F5 BIG-IP and Check Point. He started his professional career about 20 years ago in the ISP industry as an Unix Administrator, and switched to the public healthcare sector around 2001. In more recent years, he’s moved more towards working on network security and design. Apparently, having a Unix background helps a lot when working with modern security devices, since most of them are running on some flavor of Unix. When not working or spending time on DevCentral, he likes to travel, visit historic places and enjoy nature. And Niels is DevCentral’s Featured Member for July!

DevCentral: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

Niles: My first encounter with BIG-IP was during my previous job. A colleague had been working with BIG-IP before and introduced it as a replacement for the KEMP load balancer that was currently in use. So, I had to attend the ‘Administering and Configure BIG-IP’ course. It was then – when I learned about iRules – I saw the full potential of this nifty device. But during my days there I didn’t do much with the BIG-IP as in terms to administration. I would only touch the box, if my colleague was on leave. This however changed when I started working for Vosko Networking. Within about a year’s time I’ve gone through the BIG-IP certification program, spend a lot of time on DevCentral and got my hands dirty in the field. The BIG-IP areas I’m most experienced in are LTM and APM. The most fun part for me are iRules (LX).

DC: You are a Security System Engineer at Vosko Networking BV. Can you describe your typical workday?

NS: My typical workday depends whether I’m working on a project or not. When working on projects I often visit customers throughout the country to help them deploy new equipment or configure new services. Recently I’ve migrated quite a few Cisco ACE and Microsoft Forefront TMG deployments to the F5 BIG-IP platform. Other times I help customers upgrading their BIG-IPs or setting up more advanced APM configurations including SAML and SSO. When I’m not working on projects I work on support cases or trying out new stuff in our lab.

DC: You have a number of F5 Certifications including most of the Technology Specialist (LTM, GTM, APM, ASM) certifications. Why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career?

NS: First of all, they are required for Vosko Networking to participate in the F5 Support Partner program. But more important to myself is that the F5 certification program helps to get deeper knowledge in to how the various BIG-IP modules work, how they relate (interact) to each other and what part the BIG-IP plays in modern network infrastructures. The certification program is also very practical; you can directly apply what you have been learning. It helped me to get more comfortable and confident in my day to day job.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how did DevCentral helped in that situation.

NS: In my experience, there are BIG-IP challenges every day. I think this is the result of the BIG-IP being some kind of network-magic-box, that can do about everything. With most other security devices, one is limited to the functionality and settings the box is shipped with. But with BIG-IP, you can really be creative and think outside the box. If the required functionality is missing, you can build it yourself with iRules. And customers know this. I often go out to customers with a specific need, but when starting out it isn’t always clear if this is something the BIG-IP can do by default. In these situations, access to the DevCentral community is crucial. Even though BIG-IP isn’t an open source project, it’s amazing to see how members share their time, code and knowledge to help each other. For example, some code that really helped me out are Yann Desmarest’s APM Full Step Up Authentication and Stanislas Piron’s APM SharePoint authentication. Besides code, I think the Lightboard Lessons are awesome; very helpful!

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

I think I wanted to be an electrician when I was young, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t my dream job. As long as I’m able to learn new things and have new challenges, I’m happy how things are. I think I’m useless for any other job that doesn’t require a keyboard. Thanks for the privilege for being a featured member and thanks for the Lightboard Lessons as well. I really enjoy them.

Thanks Niels! Check out all of Niels' DevCentral contributions, connect with him on LinkedIn and follow Vosko: @vosko.

DevCentral’s Featured Member for May – NTT Security’s Leonardo Souza

Leonardo Souza lives in the United Kingdom, with his partner, 5-year-old daughter, and a (very) recently newborn son. He’s Brazilian and lived in Portugal for quite a while. He then moved to UK about 5 years ago ‘because of the amazing weather,’ he jokes.

Leonardo started to work with computers when he was 18 years old (he’s not 18 anymore), so he’s worked with many technologies. Fast forward a bit (he’s not that old) and while working as a network engineer, he was working on a project to migrate applications from Alteon load balancers to F5 BIG-IP LTMs. He completed his LTM Essentials and LTM Advanced training during that time (2011) and with the migration project, he was impressed with BIG-IP.

He even applied for a job at F5 in 2012 and joined as a Network Support Engineer. That moved him from Portugal to UK, and has been doing F5 products exclusively ever since.

With all that, Leonardo is DevCentral’s Featured Member for May and we got a chance to talk with Leonardo about his life, work and scripting prowess.

DevCentral: You were an F5er from 2012-15 and continue to be a very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

Leonardo: I often say that 1 year in F5 support is equal to 5 years as a F5 customer.
While in F5 support, I had multiple technical challenges every day, and I would typically go to DevCentral to check iRules documentation and get ideas for uncommon cases. After I left F5, I started using DevCentral to stay up to date about what is going on in the F5 world by reading the DevCentral articles. Then I started to go there daily and answer some questions myself. 

Short answer: to keep me updated, both about F5 news and my F5 knowledge.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

LS: Is difficult to know all F5 products, because some are for very specific networks/scenarios, but I know the common ones:
BIG-IP BIG-IP LTM, GTM/DNS, AFM, APM, ASM, EM, BIG-IQ, and iRules.

I had been a little bit lazy about the F5 certifications but recently I have done all level 300 exams. I have started study for the 401, so that should be done in the next couple months.

DC: As a Security Consultant at NTT Security, what’s your typical workday?

LS: First to clarify, the company recently changed names from NTT Com Security to NTT Security. 

I work in professional services, doing projects that use F5 products. My daily work includes doing some pre-sales activities advising pre-sales team about the F5 products, doing projects, and finding solutions or writing scripts to automate some F5 tasks.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

LS: I have been using DevCentral for many years, and iRules, to a point where it is part of my daily job. Flexibility is a major advantage for F5 and people ask all the time “Can you do this with an iRule?” 

Recently, I was working in a project to upgrade many F5 devices. We had to perform an extensive inventory for each device which was taking about 3 days per device. I wrote a Python script using iControl SOAP to perform that task. (I still prefer bash script, but there is no iControl SOAP for bash) 

It would take around 240 days to do that manually, and we did in around 3 days using the script.

DC: Finally, if you weren’t in technology – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

LS: I am doing the job I wanted since I was young and I can’t picture myself doing any other type of job.

Thanks Leonardo! Check out all Leonardo’s DevCentral contributions or connect with him on LinkedIn. And visit NTT Security on the web or follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Q/A with Admiral Group's Jinshu Peethambaran - DevCentral's Featured Member for March

Jinshu Peethambaran is a security architect currently working with Admiral Insurance. He started his career 9 years ago, managing network security operations and started working on F5 products about 5 years ago.

He is also a 2017 DevCentral MVP and DevCentral’s Featured Member for March! DevCentral got a chance to talk with Jinshu about his work, life and his dream of being 100 million miles in space.

DevCentral: Hi Jinshu, thanks for you time. You’ve been a very active contributor to the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

Jinshu: DevCentral has helped me greatly over the years as I’ve worked with F5 products, so I feel like it’s worth spending some of my time both reading posts and helping others in the community. Searching DevCentral, I found another approaches to solving issues, helping me to solve challenges. Just checking the most recent questions is a great way to learn things.

DC: Tell us a little about your areas of BIG-IP expertise.

JP: At earliest stage in my career, I was involved on basic BIG-IP LTM projects. After some successful experiences, I started working on another level and learn different BIG-IP modules.

Now, I think I’m pretty comfortable with all F5 BIG-IP modules but I’m clearly specialized in security. Now I’m pretty confident on BIG-IP LTM, DNS (formerly GTM), ASM, APM and AFM modules. I have implemented multiple solutions using these combinations for different customers, all these years.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

JP: iRules are great tool to solve unique BIG-IP challenges, but iRules are nothing without the developer’s community. DevCentral experts share experience not only about tcl coding but protocol knowledge, iRule events orders, and working iRules. And on the other side, some IT admins ask about new needs that I may answer for the next customer.
Security is a vast area and we get new requirements and challenges every time. Each time I get a new challenge, I first search on DevCentral to see if someone already solved it. If not, I’ll create my own iRule.

 DC: Can you tell us a little about your blog, Secure Leaves and why it is important to Know your network before a hacker does?

JP: Since I started working on security domain, I through to give a helping hand for others as well. So I started this blog explaining small technical challenges and solutions for that. This blog focus on security products and hence the title “Know your network before a hacker does”. 

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

JP: I’d probably be an Astronaut or a professional space traveler searching for external life and doing experiments in Mars. J When I was a kid I always dreamt about being an Astronaut, staring at the stars.

Thanks Jinshu! Check out all of Jinshu’s DevCentral contributions, check out his blog, or connect on LinkedIn. And visit Admiral Group plc on the web and LinkedIn

Related:

• Q/A with Yann Desmarest
• Q/A with SpringCM's Joel Newton
• Q/A with itacs GmbH's Kai Wilke
• Q/A with Rackspace Network Architect Vijay Emarose
• Q/A with Secure-24's Josh Becigneul
• Q/A with ExITeam's Security Engineer Stanislas Piron

Lightboard Lessons: IoT on BIG-IP

As more organizations deploy IoT applications in their data centers and clouds, they're going to need their ADC to understand the unique protocols these devices use to communicate.

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up how IoT protocol MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) works on BIG-IP v13. iRules allow you to do Topic based load balancing along with sensor authentication. And if you missed it, here is the #LBL on What is MQTT?



ps

Related:

• Lightboard Lessons: What is MQTT?
• Security Trends in 2016: Securing the Internet of Things
• The Intruders of Things
• The IoT Ready Platform
• Using F5 BIG-IP with IBM MessageSight

Q/A with itacs GmbH's Kai Wilke - DevCentral's Featured Member for February

Kai Wilke is a Principal Consultant for IT Security at itacs GmbH – a German consulting company located in Berlin City specializing in Microsoft security solutions, SharePoint deployments, and customizations as well as classical IT Consulting. He is also a 2017 DevCentral MVP and DevCentral’s Featured Member for February!

For almost 20 years in IT, he’s constantly explored the evens and odds of various technologies, including different operating systems, SSO and authentication services, RBAC models, PKI and cryptography components, HTTP-based services, proxy servers, firewalls, and core networking components. His focus in these areas has always been security related and included the design, implementation and review of secure and high availability/high performance datacenters.

DevCentral got a chance to talk with Kai about his work, life and mastery of iRules.

DevCentral: You’ve been a very active contributor to the DevCentral community and wondered what keeps you involved?

Kai: Working with online communities has always been an important thing for me and it began long time ago within the good old Usenet and the predecessor of the Darknet. Before joining the F5 community, I was also once an honored member of the Microsoft Online Community and was five times awarded as a Microsoft MVP for Enterprise Security and Microsoft-related firewall/proxy server technologies. 

My opinion is that if you want to become an expert for a certain technology or product, you should not just learn THE-ONE straight-forward method fetched from manuals, guides or even exams. Instead, you have to dive deeply into all of those edge scenarios and learn all the uncountable ways to mess the things up. And dealing with questions and problems of other peers is probably the best catalyst to gain that kind of experience. 

Besides of that, the quality of the DevCentral content and the knowledge of other community members are absolutely astonishing. It makes simply a lot of fun for me to work within the DevCentral community and to learn every day a little bit more…

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

KW: Over the years, I successfully implemented BIG-IP LTM, APM, ASM, and DNS Service deployments for our customers. Technologically, I internalized TMOS and its architecture very well and I pretty much learned how to write simple but also somewhat complex iRules to control the delivery of arbitrary data on their way from A to B in any possible fashion.

DC: You are a Principal Consultant for IT Security at itacs GmbH - a German consulting company. Can you describe your typical workday?

KW: Because of my history with Microsoft related infrastructures, my current workload is pretty versatile.

Many of my current projects are still settled in the Microsoft / Windows system environment and are covering the design and review of security related areas. Right now, I’m working with several DAX companies and also LaaS, PaaS and SaaS service providers to analyze their Active Directory and System Management infrastructures and to design and implement a very unique, fundamental and comprehensive security concept to counter those dreaded PtH (Pass-the-Hash) and APT (Advance Persistent Threat) attacks we are facing these days. 

Over the last years, my F5 customer base has periodically grown so I would say my work is a 50:50 mix right now. I do F5 workshops, designs, implementations, second and third level support as well as configuration reviews and optimization of existing environments. I work with some big web 2.0 customers that have the demand to pretty much exhaust all the capabilities of an F5. This challenges me as a network architect and as an ADC developer. 

I realize every day that working with F5 products makes so much more fun than any Microsoft product I have ever dealt with. So in the future, I will even more put my focus on F5!

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

KW: In my opinion, the F5 products themselves are not that challenging – but sometimes the underlying technologies and the detailed project requirements are. But as long as those requirements can be drawn and explained on a sheet of paper, I am somewhat confident that the BIG-IP platform is able to support the requirements – thanks to the F5 developers who have created a platform which is not purely scenario driven but rather supports a comprehensive list of RFC standards which can be combined as needed. 

For an example, one of my largest customers operates an affiliate resource tracking system with three billion web requests per day with a pretty much aggressive session setup rate during peak hours. I have designed and implemented their BIG-IP LTM platform to offload SSL-encryption and the TCP-connection handling to various backend systems using well selected and performance optimized settings. 

Other scenarios require slightly more complex content switching, the selective use of pre-authentication and/or combination with IDS/IPS systems. To support those requirements, I developed a very granular and scalable iRule administration framework which is able to simplify the configuration by using rather easy-to-use iRule configuration files (operated by non TCL developers) which will then trigger the much more complex iRule code (written and tested by TCL developers) as needed. The latest version of my iRule administration framework (which is currently under testing/development) will be able to support a couple thousand websites on a single Virtual Server, where each websites can trigger handcrafted TCL code blocks as needed, but without adding linear or even exponential overhead to the system as the regular iRule approaches would do. The core and the configuration files of the latest version are heavily based on TCL procedures to create a very flexible code base and also conditional control structures, but completely without calling any TCL procedures during runtime to boost the performance dramatically. Sounds interesting? Then stay tuned, I am sure I will publish this framework to the CodeShare once it’s stable enough… ;-)

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

KW: I was typing my first assembler code out of a C64 magazine at the age of 10, so I really wanted to be a developer and/or IT admin since then. But besides of my current job, I can also imagine being a racecar driver. I really have petrol in my blood and pretty much enjoy driving on the German Autobahn. As an alternative, I could also imagine being a cook. I really love cooking and enjoy awesome food!

DC: Thanks Kai! Just don't fire up that sterno while shifting gears!! Check out all of Kai’s DevCentral contributions and check out their blog websites: ops365.de, flow365.de and brandmysharepoint.de.

Q/A with Rackspace Network Architect Vijay Emarose - DevCentral's Featured Member for November

Koman Vijay Emarose works as a Network Architect with the Strategic Accounts team at Rackspace. He has been a “Racker” (Rackspace Employee) for 7+ years and currently he is adapting to a networking world that is pivoting towards a world of automation.

In Odaah's free time, he likes to identify DevCentral site bugs, incessantly torment Chase Abbott to fix them – particularly the badges and he is DevCentral’s Featured Member for November!

Vijay's other hobbies include traveling and has been to more than eleven countries and looking to increase that number in the future. Personal finance blogs and binge watching documentaries are his guilty pleasures.

DevCentral got an opportunity to talk with Vijay about his work, life and blog.

DevCentral: You’ve been an active contributor to the DevCentral community and wondered what keeps you involved?

Vijay Emarose: I have been a passive DevCentral user for quite a while and relied heavily on DevCentral to improve my iRule skills. The continued support for DevCentral community among F5 employees and other BIG-IP administrators provided me with the motivation to start sharing the knowledge that I have gained over the years. Answering questions raised by other members helps me to reinforce my knowledge and opens me up to alternate solutions that I had not considered. Rest assured, I will strive to keep the momentum going.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

VE: I started working on F5 during the transition period from 9.x to 10.x code version in 2010. BIG-IP LTM & GTM are my strong points. I have some experience with AFM, APM and ASM but not as much as I would like. Working with clients of various sizes from small scale to large enterprises at Rackspace, exposed me to a wide variety of F5 platforms from the 1600s to the VIPRION.

I am sporadically active in the LinkedIn Community for F5 Certified Professionals. I had taken the beta versions of the F5 Certification exams and I am currently an F5 Certified Technology Specialist in LTM & GTM. I am eagerly looking forward to the upcoming F5 402 Exam.

I have been fortunate enough to work with the F5 Certification Team (Ken Salchow, Heidi Schreifels, et al) in the Item Development Workshop (IDW) for F5’s 201 TMOS Administration Certification Exam and it was an eye-opener to understand the amount of thought and effort that goes into creating a certification exam. 

The 2016 F5 Agility in Chicago was my very first F5 Agility conference and I enjoyed meeting with and learning from Jason Rahm, Chase Abbott and other DevCentral members. I look forward to participating in future F5 Agility Conferences.

DC: You are a Network Architect with Rackspace, the largest managed cloud provider. Where does BIG-IP fit in the services you offer or within your own infrastructure?

VE: Rackspace is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting and participates in the F5 UNITY Managed Service Provider Partner Program at the Global Gold Level. 

Various F5 platforms from the 1600s to the VIPRIONS are offered to customers requiring a dedicated ADC depending on their requirements. LTM & GTM are widely supported. 

In the past, I have been a member of the RackConnect Product team within Rackspace. “RackConnect” is a product that allows automated hybrid connections between a customer’s dedicated environment and Rackspace’s public cloud. F5 platforms were utilized as the gateway devices in this product. There is a DevCentral article on RackConnect by Lori MacVittie. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the F5 employees who support Rackspace that I have had the pleasure of working with - Richard Tocci, Scott Huddy and Kurt Lanthier. They have been of massive help to me whenever I required clarification or assistance with F5.

DC: Your blog, Network-Maven.com, documents your experiences in the field of Network Engineering, Application Delivery, Security and Cloud Computing. What are some of the highlights that the community might find interesting?

VE: This is a recent blog that I started to share my knowledge and experience working in the Networking field. Application Delivery Controllers are a niche area within Networking and I was fortunate enough to learn from some of the best at Rackspace. My idea is to share some of my experiences that could potentially help someone new to the field. 

Working with thousands of customer environments running different code versions on various F5 platforms has provided me with a rich variety of experience that could be of help to fellow F5 aficionados who are executing an F5 maintenance or implementing a new feature/function in their F5 environments.

DC: Describe one of your biggest challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

VE: DevCentral has been a great resource for me on multiple occasions and it is tough to pinpoint a single challenge. I rely on it to learn from other’s experiences and to develop my iRule and iControl REST skills. 

I have benefited from the iRule: 20 Lines or Less series and I am an avid follower of the articles published by community members. For someone starting new with F5, I would certainly recommend following the articles and catching up on the iRules: 20 Lines or less series.

DC: Lastly, if you weren’t working in IT – what would be your dream job?

VE: I haven’t figured it out yet. Tech, finance & travel interest me. May be some combination of these interests would be the answer.

DC: Thanks Vijay and congratulations! You can find Vijay on LinkedIn, check out his DevCentral contributions and follow @Rackspace.

Related:

• Q/A with Yann Desmarest - DevCentral's Featured Member for July
• Q/A with SpringCM's Joel Newton - DevCentral's Featured Member for August
• Q/A with Secure-24's Josh Becigneul - DevCentral's Featured Member for September
• Q/A with ExITeam’s Security Engineer Stanislas Piron - DevCentral's Featured Member for October