Chris Phillips’ Blog - API, Integration and Governance

Recently when visiting a customer, they were wanting a custom policy that could be used to do HMAC validation of payloads.

In brief HMAC is a tool to verify a payload programmatically. When the payload is passed it a signature is attached, in this case in a header. The HMAC algorithm then uses a secret key to generate the digest and that is compared against the signature passed.

I have spent years trying to find out how to get better logging from the OCP router. I am not going to steal credit, but go to this blog, its amazing! https://alexandre-vazquez.com/how-to-enable-access-logs-on-openshift-default-routes/

I have been asked almost daily for the last few weeks what is my preferred CICD took or process. My answer is always the same, given APIC has a rest interface the best tool is the one the team know.

Recently at a client we were hit with a high latency connection. In order to prove this was not a problem with API Connect we decided to execute a curl command as close to the datapower as possible.

The Platform Navigator has a requirement for two types of PVC. One of these is RWX and RWO. For many customers these can both be backed onto RWX but occasionally the RWX is not fast enough. One sympton of this is site unavailable error messages.

By default, the PN install puts both PVCs into RWX. This article will cover how to change the storage class and assumes you have a single running Platform Navigator already.

“Slow Start” patterns are convenient when a POD is ready to receive traffic, but we may want to only send a small workload of traffic until we have established that it is ready to receive all traffic.

One of the reasons my blog doesn’t have so many updates is that I don’t often find new problems.

The another reason is due to APAR https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/LI82702

The API Gateway consists of one or more DataPower pods. These are listed as Ready in the pod list. This article explains what we mean by ready.

As I spend a lot of time working away from home, I VPN into my home lab so that I can play. However for the first time my homelab was on the same network range as the hotel I was in, and so when I vpned in, nothing would route.

To get around this I created an addition entry in the routing table for each server you want to connect to, this will be lost after a reboot.

sudo route add 192.168.31.1 -interface ppp0

ppp0 is the tunnel interface from ifconfig and 192.168.31.1 is the IP of the target you want to connect to.