Blogging Techstacks

BigIP V11 Upgrade Reminder: "$::" in iRules Will Not Work

A reminder to myself and others who are scheduling upgrades to version 11 of the BigIP software: Although the matchclass (DevCentral login required) command is deprecated (but will still work as of v11.2.0), data groups referenced in your irules using the $::data_group_name syntax will result in TCL errors written to your ltm logs and Connection Resets to your end-users.

If you come across some error messages in the ltm logs like this:

MMM DD HH:MM:SS tmm err tmm[PID]: 01220001:3: TCL error: /Partition/the_offending_irule - can't read "::your_data_group": no such variable while executing "matchclass [IP::client_addr] equals $::your_data_group"

The quickest way to fix and restore service is to remove the '$::' from in front of your Data Group in your irule and then wrap it in double quotes. (For example, $::your_data_group becomes "your_data_group") 

To avoid future matchclass incompatibilities, it might be wise to modify those rules using matchclass to the new class match functions. Migrating matchclass functions to class match syntactically looks to be just as easy—replace matchclass with class match (although I personally haven't done this yet in my rules using matchclass).

Removing Gmail Messages from BlackBerry Inbox

Sometimes, the old 'battery pull' method for removing messages that will not delete when you delete them from your BlackBerry Inbox doesn't work. Sometimes, pulling the battery to perform a hard reset removes them, sometimes it removes only some of them. Sometimes, you're on a long conference call and a battery pull would not be advisable and that message is just sitting there...taunting you. Why won't you delete? What makes you so special, email from Marco's Pizza, that you want to stick around? I deleted you! Why won't you leave? 

Deleting Prior looks like it's does something as the messages briefly disappear but they quickly come back to haunt me anew. 

Sure. After 30 days, they will vanish. That's the built-in default for the Inbox. This is configurable, too. BlackBerry 7.1 let's you set the interval for how long these undeletable messages will taunt you. You can lower it to 15 days and if you're feeling mischievous, configure your friend's BlackBerry to save them up to Forever. Simply open your Inbox, press the BlackBerry menu button and select Options. Then choose Messages Display and Actions. Scroll all the way down to Days To Keep Messages and then select 15, 30, 60, 90, all the way up to Forever.

Today was one of those days so I decided to once again poke around in the various options and now I think I've found a reliable way to get rid of them. Once again, go into your Inbox, press the BlackBerry menu button and select Options. Then, select Inbox Management. Under Email Accounts, deselect your gmail account, press the Back button and Save your change. The messages are now gone from your Inbox. Repeat this process but select your email address again to reassociate your gmail inbox with your main inbox.

Incidentally, this may also work when Facebook Messages in your inbox will not delete as well and if I ever start using that account, we'll see if this works for those, too.

Apache Tomcat 7.0.30 Released

The Apache Tomcat team announced the availability of Tomcat version 7.0.30 earlier today. The release announcement provides the following snippet on what's new/changed:

This release contains numerous bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.29. The notable changes include:
- Significantly reduced memory footprint during web application start
  while Servlet 3.0 annotation and SCI scanning is in progress.
- Adds support for scanning of classes that use Java 7 specific byte
  code for Servlet 3.0 annotation and SCI scanning.
- Improvements to DIGEST and FORM authentication.

You can view everything that is new, changed, and/or fixed in the Tomcat 7.0.30 changelog and binaries are available from Tomcat download mirrors everywhere.