Big-IP: Custom IIS SOAP Monitor

In working on a production issue with my company’s flagship SaaS product I worked with some of the brilliant F5 engineers to isolate one web server in the load balanced pool which was intermittently failing. The F5 engineer recommended a health monitor that does more than just poll for a static page. He suggested we implement some kind of soap call to make the application pool do some work and return a result (I guess in case the IIS application pool is misbehaving but not down). So I worked with one of our developers to do just that but ran into some caveats which required yet another custom health monitor.

Big-IP: Sharepoint 2010 Monitor

While specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.

Run Updates = Rocket Science

So, I just recently tried to do some basic updates for ocs 2007 R2 by running the venerable “serverupdateinstaller.exe” found HERE. Thank goodness I setup a highly redundant load balanced farm of front end servers as the first server updated immediately had issues with the front-end services starting. Wow, updates strike again (other stories forthcoming soon, I promise).

Exchange 2010 SP1: DAG Node Maintenance

If you are performing maintenance on DAG nodes here is the process you want to go through (along with a slight caveat to fix a possible active copy move issue you may run into). In my environment I have three nodes in a cross-site dag.

All the commands below are run in an administrative exchange powershell prompt.

Microsoft Unified Access Gateway 2010 Notes

If you are new to the Microsoft Unified Access Gateway then you really should know some of these things I ran into while trying to get my array setup and running smoothly. Sure, to find my single post among the masses is probably not going to happen, but if you do find it before you start your endeavor then I promise you will be saved time and frustration. The first major frustration, the installation….