Launch BIGIP Trial Edition for Oracle VirtualBox

A couple of years ago, at work, I ran into an engineering marvel - a network balancer. The LB class itself was unfamiliar to me then, so I eagerly began to study. At that time I was in charge of the web server, so I had to work with the balancer on the part of the client, not the administrator, but the curiosity still took its toll.

At that time, we used BigIP 10.5 with the LTM (Local Traffic Manager) module. The f5 company provides a trial version of LTM Virtual Edition for 90 days, which can later be re-activated with a new trial key. Here you can download the image and request the keys.

You can take 5 keys at once and use them as they expire. Immediately, I note that f5 officially supports only VMWare, and somewhere else I heard about Hyper-V. I did not want to spend money on the hypervisor, the home computer runs under MacOS, so only VirtualBox remained. Without surprise, I found that the image starts, but freezes almost at the very beginning.

Freezes loading on GRUB message Loading stage2 . This can be fixed by adding a COM port to the virtual machine. After that, the image normally loads to login. Username root, password default. After that, you can run the config to set the network settings, but instead an error will fall out
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Cannot connect to mcpd Cannot connect to mcpd. Your preferences and aliases will not be available until it comes bakup. The connection to mcpd has been lost, try again. Error: Unable to examine the state of MCP. Exiting. 

It makes no sense to try again, as recommended by the message above - nothing happens. In addition, the following message constantly appears:

 localhost emerg logger: Re-starting chmand 

To begin with, you should turn off this flood error, since it will not let you work in peace. You can disable the cmand service with the command:

 bigstart stop chmand 

After that, you need to fix the file / bin / qp . I used nano, it was available in this image. It is necessary to fix only the beginning of the file, after the line “if [-f / bin / halid]; then there are no changes.

 #!/bin/sh # # Script to query and return platform type (D44, D50, etc.) # # It uses the info saved in /PLATFORM if available; otherwise it # simply calls halid & returns the appropriate field (writing /PLATFORM as well)! if [ -f /PLATFORM ]; then grep platform= /PLATFORM | sed -e 's/platform=//' exit 0 fi if [ -f /bin/halid ]; then 

Then you should fix the file / tmp / platform_info , the Info parameter: base_mac should not be changed.

 Info:system_id=Z99 Info:system_family=0x80000000 Info:system_type=0xb Info:system_if=Z99 Info:host_id=Z99 Info:base_mac=< > Info:mac_offset=0 

Finally, you need to fix the / PLATFORM file:

 platform=Z99 family=0x80000000 host=Z99 

Everything! You can rebuild the car and safely go to the config. I will not describe the process of setting up and first running BigIP.

At least not in this article. There are good manuals from the manufacturer and amateur videos on YouTube on this topic.

Good luck.