Your 3AM friend

It’s 3am, you are putting the finishing touches on your latest deployment of a virtual appliance via Riverbed Services Platform, and your shining glory is Checkpoint Firewall in a remote branch.  You’re going to sleep much better at night knowing that your little branch computers are sleeping safe at night with a big bad firewall protecting it.  You have the firewall running, you are able to ping the management interface, and you are preparing to put the device inline, but.... 

You think, “if I put the firewall inline, how am I going to put both interfaces in at the same time.  I sure am glad I thought about this because I was just about to blackhole this site.”  Now you think to yourself, how am I going to get this firewall inline, without being behind the firewall?

Well, your 3am friend is the job command.  Job is a CLI command that invokes the Scheduler within the Steelhead.  There isn’t a GUI equivalent for this, but don’t be scared, this is an easy command to master.  The syntax of the jobs command is as follows:

sh#(config)job number command number “command”

sh#(config)job number date-time hh:mm:ss

One of the biggest benefits of the job command is that it runs locally, and it will run multiple commands from a single command line entry.  So in our example we would have to run two commands to put a virtual server inline on RSP.  So the command sequence that we would execute would be:

sh#(config) job 1 command 1 “rsp dataflow inpath0_0 add opt-vni vniname_lan_interface_first vni-num end”

sh#(config)job 1 command 2 “rsp dataflow inpath0_0 add opt-vni vniname_wan_interface_last vni-num end”

sh#(config)job 1 enable

Let’s review what we just did.  The first job command inserts the LAN side interface into the virtual network data flow, and the second command inserts the WAN side interface, the third job enables the job for execution. 

To actually run the job we’ll issue:

sh#job 1 execute

One of my other favorite uses for the job command is to create time-based QoS.  In the particular instance that is coming to mind, I had a client that needed to limit replication traffic on a shared link during the day, but after 6pm, they wanted it to run full on.  At 7am they wanted to return bandwidth restrictions.  Using job, I was able to create a QoS rule that activated at 6pm and then returned back to a restricted state at the prescribed time.

So the next time you're up at 3am, get your friend to do the job, so you can get some sleep!

Comments

[William Peters]

thanks for the tip Brad! So, if i wanted to run the Firewall job at one minute after three, I would then just add

job 1 date-time 03:01:00

correct?

cheers,
William

[William Peters]

thanks for the tip Brad! So, if i wanted to run the Firewall job at one minute after three, I would then just add

job 1 date-time 03:01:00

correct?

cheers,
William

[Brad Wood]

You are exactly correct. If you want to make it a one time command simply add the date.

Happy jobbing!

[sleep]

Thanks for these tips Brad! Sleep is very important to the human body. It helps regenerate our body's strength and its natural protection from viruses and bacteria.