Quickly test UDP on XC with NTP

Sometimes I want to test UDP connectivity, usually through F5 XC. Here’s a quick way to set up NTP using Ubuntu.

I basically copied this link for setting up NTP on client and server.

NTP Server

• deployed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install ntp -y
sudo systemctl status ntp

NTP Client

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install ntpdate -y

Test from client to server

ntpdate -q [ip-address-of-server]

F5 XC as UDP proxy and load balancer

To proxy this through F5 XC, you cannot use HTTP or TCP Load Balancers, obviously. You must create the equivalent with the Virtual Host objects:

1. Create Endpoint (IP address of NTP server)
2. Create Cluster (group of endpoints)
3. Create Route (send traffic to cluster)
4. Create Advertise Policy (listen on a given IP address on a CE, or “Virtual Network” and “vesi-io-shared/public” if you want to advertise to public Internet)
5. Create Virtual Host object to link all of these together.

Screenshot of Advertise Policy that will use default tenant IP on RE's

Notes

• at this time it looks like you cannot have a custom VIP for internet-facing traffic for UDP traffic.
• at this time it looks like Performance and Application Dashboards do not include UDP traffic.

Windows

I am not 100% sure but I think I used this tool to easily demo with a Windows desktop as the NTP client.