DevCentral’s Featured Member for October – Jad Tabbara

Jad Tabbara has been a Security Engineer with e-Xpert Solutions in Switzerland since 2014.

He graduated from INSA de Lyon FRANCE with a master degree in telecommunications and nowadays, work takes the most part of my time, but happy to succeed in his endeavors.
As hobbies, he enjoys playing sports (soccer, tennis), traveling, sharing time with family and is DevCentral’s Featured Member for October. Our second Featured Member from e-Xpert Solutions!

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

Jad: First, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity. 

I have never contributed to a forum other than DevCentral. Compared to other editors, I must admit that DevCentral is well designed such as all other F5 websites, articles and documentations. DevCentral is a great place to learn and a simple access to information regarding iRules, iControl, etc. 

As a part of my personality, I like to share my experience and help others to achieve what they are doing, this is what I found at the community and keeps me involved.

DC: You are an Engineer at e-Xpert Solutions SA. Can you describe your typical workday?

JT: There is no typical workday at e-Xpert Solutions since we always have new challenges, projects and customers. As part of my work, I implement security solutions mainly based on BIG-IP LTM, APM and ASM modules. I participate to all phases of a project (design, install & configure, maintain and troubleshoot).

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?

JT: As good news, I’ve just added the 304 APM to my certification list. My objective is to get all remaining certifications before next year (BIG-IP ASM, DNS and 401). These certifications help me to learn more about BIG IP features and prove my technical skills. I believe that it’s a differentiator for me and e-Xpert Solutions. Finally, for customers, it guarantees a high level of expertise.

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

JT: There are many situations where DevCentral and iRules helped me a lot! Let me share with you one of the hardest issue I had to deal with. A customer was load balancing SFB solution through F5. 

An intermittent voice call interruption was occurring after 5 seconds only when tethering connection using a smartphone with a specific ISP. Thanks to DevCentral that helped me to make advanced tcpdump captures from end to end. After analysis, the problem was found. The client connected to the specific ISP used same source port for two connections (F5 and SFB). The F5 was replying using the wrong socket. Finally, to work around this weird client behavior, we changed the “Source Port Translation” option on the VS from “Preserve” to “Change”.

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?

JT: When I was a kid, my dream was to be a soccer player. Later with the use of trendy applications such as MSN and Skype I became curious to understand how Internet world works. So, I decided to make studies in this field. During this period, I realized risks of Internet (introduced by malicious users) so I came up to specialize and work in security.

Thanks Jad! Check out all of Jad's DevCentral contributions, connect with him on LinkedIn and visit e-Xpert Solutions SA, follow on Twitter or visit LinkedIn.