Objective 2.05 on the 301a blueprint requires the candidate to describe use cases for MAC masquerading. MAC masquerading is a feature that allows you to manually allocate a MAC address to a traffic group across a BIG-IP pair configured for High Availability. More specifically this MAC address floats between the devices in a HA pair along with the floating self-IPs and Virtual Addresses within...
Objective 2.06 of the 301a blueprint requires the candidate to have an understanding of how to setup Sync-Only and Sync-Failover Device Groups on a BIG-IP system. These two concepts form part of the Device Service Clustering (DSC) feature, basically High Availability. Introduced in v11.x, DSC improved on the previous High Availability mechanisms available by allowing configuration synchronisation and failover between two or more BIG-IP devices,...
Objective 2.04 in the 301a syllabus requires the candidate to have an understanding of the authentication process as it relates to remote authentication and authorisation on a BIG-IP system. The BIG-IP system utilises two different account types: System maintenance account: This is your 'root' user, the account which is enabled by default on a BIG-IP device. This is the most powerful user on...
TLS Client Authentication One of the objectives (3.02) on the 301a exam blueprint talks about how to configure the various different SSL profile settings. One feature that you will struggle to find (or at least I have) utilised outside of some relatively focused and specialised situations, is that of Client Authentication (sometimes referred to as 'mutual TLS authentication'). Unlike the bog standard TLS...
In pursuit of my LTM specialist certification one of the early topics (Objective 1.03) in the blueprint is that of offloading functions to the LTM device. One of those functions - HTTP compression is a topic I've never given a great deal of thought to as we don't tend to use it heavily with our customers. It's difficult to say what level of understanding F5...
Getting there... The path to becoming a F5 certified requires a number of prerequisites. At the most basic level you are required to create an account with the F5 Credential Management System (CMS) at https://certification.f5.com. Once registered and assigned a candidate ID, you login and are faced with a screen similar to the following (note: as I have already passed the 101 and 201 exams...
