Free Practice Questions for F5 F5CAB4 Exam

Although /var/log/ltm is primarily associated with Local Traffic Manager events, it is also the primary destination for system-level alerts generated by the Control Plane's chmand (Chassis Manager Daemon). Hardware status changes, including power supply failures, fan speeds, and temperature warnings, are logged as "notice" or "critical" events within the LTM log file.

Time synchronization is a critical component of Control Plane management, as it ensures that logs are accurately timestamped and that High Availability (HA) trust relationships remain valid1.

Configuration Location: The list of configured NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers and their status is managed under System > Configuration > Device > NTP .

Procedural Importance: If the system clock drifts significantly between two devices in an HA pair, the Control Plane may experience a "Time Delta" error33. This drift often causes a failure in device trust, preventing the ConfigSync process from functioning correctly.

System Integrity: Accurate time is also essential for the validity of SSL/TLS certificates used for both administrative management access and high availability communication.

Verification: Administrators can use this section of the Configuration Utility to confirm that the BIG-IP is communicating with its designated upstream time sources and that the local clock is correctly synchronized to the network environment .

The Statistics Dashboard is the primary graphical interface used by administrators to monitor the real-time performance and health of the BIG-IP system.

System-Wide Overview: Navigating to Statistics > Dashboard provides a centralized view of critical system-level metrics, including global CPU utilization (across all TMM instances and the Linux host) and total memory usage.

Performance Tracking: In addition to CPU and memory, the dashboard displays other vital statistics such as total active connections, throughput (bits/packets per second), SSL transactions per second (TPS), and compression efficiency.

Operational Health: Monitoring these metrics from the dashboard allows the administrator to quickly identify performance trends or resource exhaustion that could impact the Control Plane or Data Plane stability.

Comparison to Other Menus:

Local Traffic > Virtual Servers: Provides statistics specific to traffic objects rather than global system resources.

Network > Interfaces: Shows physical layer statistics like link status, errors, and drops for specific ports.

Device Management > Overview: Focuses on high availability (HA) states, synchronization status, and device trust rather than granular performance metrics.

Managing the license is a primary Control Plane task required to activate software modules and features on a BIG-IP device.

License Management Utility: All actions related to the device license, including initial activation, renewal, and adding add-on keys, are performed under the System > License section of the Configuration Utility.

Procedural Requirements: Licensing often requires the generation of a "dossier," which is a unique encrypted string used by the F5 License Server to generate the final license file.

Impact on Services: Updating or re-activating a license generally requires a restart of system services (such as the tmm daemon), which will temporarily disrupt traffic processing unless performed on a standby unit in a high availability pair.

Add-on Licenses: If an administrator needs to increase the capacity of a specific module (like increasing the SSL TPS limit or adding a new module like ASM), the new registration keys are entered through this same interface using the "Re-activate" button.

On a BIG-IP system, NTP (Network Time Protocol) configuration is part of the system-level configuration settings. In the Configuration Utility, NTP servers are configured under the System configuration hierarchy.

The correct navigation path is:

System > Configuration > Device > NTP

This location allows the administrator to:

Add, modify, or remove NTP servers

Ensure accurate system time synchronization

Maintain proper time alignment required for features such as ConfigSync, HA failover, logging, and certificate validation

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. System > Platform is used for hardware-related settings.

B. System > Preferences manages UI and user preferences.

C. System > Services controls system daemons and services, not time configuration.

Therefore, the correct answer is D. System > Configuration.

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Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From BIG-IP A34dministration Control Plane Administration documents: Authentication and authorization events are handled by the system's PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). For Control Plane security auditing, all login attempts—whether local or remote (LDAP/RADIUS/TACACS+)—and SSH-related security events are recorded in /var/log/secure. This is the primary log for troubleshooting administrative access issues

When BIG-IP is configured to use remote authentication (such as LDAP), all authentication and authorization attempts—including successes and failures—are logged to /var/log/secure.

For LDAP-based administrative login issues, /var/log/secure contains:

LDAP authentication failures

PAM authentication errors

Authorization and access-denied messages

Details explaining why a remote user could not log in

Why the other options are incorrect:

/var/log/user.log is not a standard BIG-IP log file for authentication.

/var/log/ltm logs traffic management events, not user authentication.

/var/log/messages contains general system messages but not detailed authentication failure information.

Therefore, the correct log file to troubleshoot LDAP administrative login failures is /var/log/secure.

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On BIG-IP systems, authentication and authorization events are logged in /var/log/secure. This includes:

Successful and failed SSH login attempts

Invalid user authentication attempts

PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) authentication failures

Access denials related to secure services

Why the other options are incorrect:

/var/log/messages contains general system messages and service events, not detailed authentication failures.

/var/log/audit records administrative configuration changes (who changed what and when), not login attempts.

/var/log/ltm logs traffic-management (TMM) and application-related events.

Therefore, the correct log file for investigating unauthorized SSH login attempts is /var/log/secure.

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Generating a QKView is a standard procedure for identifying device health and upgrade readiness42. Within the Configuration Utility, this Control Plane diagnostic tool is located under System > Support43. This utility collects configuration and state data into a single file used by the iHealth 'Upgrade Advisor' to report on known bugs or compatibility issues prior to a version change.

In the BIG-IP Configuration Utility, status icons provide immediate health information. A red diamond specifically indicates that the object itself is administratively disabled. When a virtual server is disabled, BIG-IP will not accept or process traffic for that virtual server, regardless of pool or node state.

If all pool members were down, the virtual server would typically show a yellow triangle (available but no resources).

If all pool members were disabled, the virtual server would usually still be enabled but unavailable due to pool status, not shown as a red diamond.

Protocol mismatch (HTTPS sent to HTTP) does not change the administrative status icon of the virtual server.

Therefore, the red diamond clearly indicates the virtual server is disabled, making D the correct answer.