Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

We've been having issues with persistence on our F5's since we launched our new product. We have tried many different ways of trying to get our clients to stick on a server. Of course the first step was using a standard cookie persistence which the F5 was injecting. All of our products which use SSL is being terminated on the F5, which makes cookie work fine even for SSL traffic. After we started seeing clients going to many servers, we figured it would be safe to use a JSESSIONID cookie which is a standard Java application server cookie that is always unique per session. We implemented the following Irule (slightly modified in order to get more logging): http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&view=topic&postid=1171255 (registration is free) when HTTP_REQUEST { # Check if there is a JSESSIONID cookie if {[HTTP::cookie "JSESSIONID"] ne ""}{ # Persist off of the cookie value with a timeout of 2 hours (7200 seconds) persi...

My company was paying a lot for an expensive CMS system which wasn't working properly, so I had mentioned we should look at Joomlah and Drupal, as some of the popular systems out on the internet. Of course IT wasn't as involved as we should have been, and marketing is essentially forcing us to use Drupal. Then we starting giving some of our requirements and some of the lack of integrated core functionality is pretty disappointing for a proper CMS. I still have yet to see a full requirements list, but I do have a list of half a dozen or so on the operations side surrounding deployment, rollback, and environment management. I hope someone puts together a proper requirements list so we know where the technology will work well and where it will fail. I

In other news on a side consulting gig I am doing we moved the company from exchange to Google apps. It's been a bit painful, but it will be more efficient in terms of cost and support. With DR being very important to the firm, this is a perfect fit, especially with the Postini archiving solutions. With such a small firm it made a lot of sense, and should prove to be a perfect fit. Also we are re-architecting the overall infrastructure from a dual location (DR) setup with clustering to a single location. In the process we are moving from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2. I haven't done a lot of Hyper-v, but I have done a lot of VM work, Windows, and iSCSI. This should prove to be an interesting project both on technology and moving to cloud based resources, as well as the future direction of the company. Expect more soon!