BIG-IP: Load Balancer Upgrade

I had the pleasure of doing an F5 BIG-IP load balancer upgrade recently and am happy with the way the F5 people have designed their systems for fail over. Essentially you will use different system partitions to host different versions of their product and you change which one you want to boot to after updating the inactive partition. This, theoretically, means you can always go back to a working configuration if something goes awry. I’m unhappy with how fragmented their documentation is in getting from point A to point B though. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do…

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CentOS/Redhat 5.x Post-Install Script

I whipped up a post install script to run on our new linux servers that drastically reduced the amount of manual effort involved with post-deployment configuration. I’m sure this could some how be integrated into the kick deployment. In any case, this script helps setup your sudo users, snmp services, and some other basic things. Modify to your environment and run directly after deployment on your headless linux servers. Save the script and change to . Continue reading

CentOS/Redhat 5.x Kickstart Deployment

Not too long ago I was tasked with deploying a decent number of CentOS 5.3 and Redhat servers to BL490 blades and VMs in our datacenter (part of a massive environment deployment with HP C7000 enclosures, virtual connect, and a lot of patience). I hate manual configuration so I figured now is as good of time as any to get on the kickstart bandwagon. Here is how I did it:

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