Week One: Initial BigIP LTM VE Configuration Using Bigpipe Commands To Add VLAN & Self IP Address

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The below article is the first in a series of articles to help get you more familiar with the BigIP BigPipe commands used to manage an LTM VE or Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition installed in VMWare Player as noted in this article. After following the steps in this article you will have created two VLAN’s (Virtual Local Area Networks) and added an IP address to each VLAN which will be the foundation of the series of articles that will help you setup and configure your LTM VE to do basic load balancing followed by other articles that build on that foundation. The future articles will become more in depth by first taking you through basic troubleshooting steps using and overtime using more advanced techniques for troubleshooting issues on a BigIP Local Traffic Manager.

Technology Insights

Install F5 BIG-IP LTM VE Trial In VMware

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The F5 BIG-IP hardware line is fairly amazing so needless to say I was really excited to find out that there was a VMware image and VirtualBox image available to trial. This allows people not only to check out the BIG-IP software, which is built on top of CentOS Linux, but also the ability to easily test configurations. Below I describe the process all the way from downloading the actual VMware image and launching the image in VMware Player to logging into the BIG-IP LTM VE instance and enabling the trial license.

Technology Insights

F5 BIG-IP: Resource Provisioning Settings: Dedicated, Nominal, Minimum, None (Disabled)

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When setting up a BIG-IP instance as a VM or virtual machine there were various settings that I wanted to become more familiar with and make sure I understood. F5 typically has really great documentation but some of it can be hard to locate and filtering through pages and pages of information to find a small amount of information can be a pain. I will be writing numerous articles related to specific F5 BIG-IP settings even though that same information may easily be available from the F5 support site so people searching Google can hopefully find it much quicker. Below I describe the four Resource Provisioning Settings available for the F5 BIG-IP modules.

Technology Insights

Install Backtrack 4 On Windows 7 In A Virtual Machine Using Windows Virtual PC

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I have been using a Windows 7 laptop for quite awhile as my daily driver and recently wanted to install Backtrack 4 in a virtual machine so I wasn’t required to dual boot or use a different laptop for BT4. I thought about using VMware as Martin wrote an article a couple months ago about installing Backtrack in a VM on Windows 7 but a couple months ago I discovered Windows Virtual PC during a Windows XP VM install. So far I have been really happy with Windows Virtual PC and decided to try installing Backtrack 4 in a Windows Virtual PC virtual machine. Below are the details on how to setup the Windows Virtual PC virtual machine and then information on how to install Backtrack 4 in that VM.

Technology Errors

Backtrack 4 Installation StartX Error: AddScreen/ScreenInit Failed For Driver 0

Errors36 Comments

When installing Backtrack 4 on a Windows Virtual PC VM this afternoon I got an error when attempting to start the X server. After initially booting the DVD inside the virtual machine I set up for the Backtrack 4 installation I got the error starting X with the startx command. Resolving it was easy for me though I don’t know that it would always be as easy for others. Below I describe the error received when starting X and what I did to resolve the problem.