Advanced Firewall Manager

Welcome to Initech! Today is your first day as the principal firewall engineer, congratulations! The employee you are replacing, Milton, is rumored to be sitting on a beach in Key West sipping Mai Tai’s and took his red stapler but left no documentation…

The marketing team, now led by Bill Lumbergh, launched a new campaign for Initech’s TPS reports overnight and no one can access the web server. The only information the web server administrators know is that the IP address of the Web server is 10.30.0.50 and that Mr. Lumbergh is furious the world does not know about the glory of TPS reports!!

Let’s start by testing the web server to verify. On your workstation open a browser (we prefer you use the Chrome shortcut labeled BIG-IP UI, all the tabs are pre-populated) and enter the address of the web server (http://10.1.20.11). No Bueno! Let’s see if we can even ping the host. Launch a command prompt (startrun cmd) and type ‘ping 10.1.20.11’. Bueno! Looks like the server is up and responding to pings, as such, this is likely not a network connectivity issue.

You ask one of your colleagues, who just got out of his meeting with the Bob’s, if he knows the IP address of the firewall. He recalls the firewall they would traverse for this communication is bigip01.f5demo.com and its management IP address is 10.1.1.4. In your browser, open a new tab and navigate to https://10.1.1.4. The credentials to log into the device are username: admin and password: f5DEMOs4u (these can also be found on the login banner of the device for convenience). Note if you receive a security warning it is ok to proceed to the site and add as a trusted site.

F5? F5 makes a data center firewall? Maybe I should do a little reading about what the F5 firewall is before I proceed deeper into the lab…