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Posted on in Networking
You'll find that some network problems can only be solved by sticking a packet sniffer on the network and seeing what the packets are doing. In a switched environment, this will not work properly since each port is configured to only broadcast traffic destined for the MAC addresses it has …
Posted on in networking
One of my pet peeves is Cisco switch and router interfaces that remain unlabeled. There is nothing worse that trying to debug a network problem when the problematic interface is unlabeled. Instead of spending valuable time working on the actual problem, you've got to trace down where this cable goes …
Posted on in Networking
I've been in the situation before were I needed to discover the neighbors of a Cisco device programmatically. This is useful in a case where you want to crawl a network without hard-coding a list of devices into your script. By default, all Cisco devices have Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP …
Posted on in Networking
If you are at all familiar with <acronym title="Simple Network Management Protocol">SNMP</acronym>, you've probably heard of "community strings". Community strings are similar to passwords. They define and grant access to a device's <acronym title="Management Information Base">MIB</acronym>. If you've used SNMP in conjuction with a …
Posted on in Software
This site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.2.3. This is a security and bug fix that addresses several issues in WordPress 2.2.2. There are two high priority updates in this release:
Posted on in Networking
I've got a Class C (/24, subnet of 256 IPs) that I assign glue addresses for point-to-point links out of. Although all these little /30 subnets are in the same location, they are not guaranteed to be on the same router. So, the question is, how can I see which …
Posted on in Graphics Design
More giving credit where credit is due.
I recently had the great misfortune of opening Slaptijack in Internet Explorer. I was so horrified with how the site looked in IE, I immediately enlisted the help of Web Developer Stephen Hebert of Acadian Imaging. Generally, I prefer to figure these sorts …
Posted on in System Administration
This comes up pretty infrequently, but I think it's worth knowing. I specifically had a situation where I was greping hostnames out of a file. Personally, I like hostnames to appear in all uppercase, but this file was full of hostnames in all lowercase. You can solve the problem with …
Posted on in Networking
Generally speaking, a route server is a network device that does not participate directly in routing, but carries an entire routing table that other devices may refer to. Often times, this is a router that carries the entire Internet BGP routing table (currently over 220,000 routes).
More commonly, a …
Posted on in Graphics Design
Without much fanfare, Slaptijack broke into the Alexa Top 1,000,000 web sites earlier this week. Although the Alexa ranking is notoriously inaccurate, it does give some gauge of a site's popularity.
Since Alexa relies on their toolbar to determine the reach of a website, I'd like to thank …
Posted on in Software
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., makers of the popular BIND <acronym title="Domain Name Service">DNS</acronym> server and INN Usenet server, has announced the End of Life for BIND 8 . I received an email from ISC on this topic earlier in the month, but I wasn't aware that the <acronym …
Posted on in Programming
Sometimes it seems like a great idea to receive updates whenever someone commits something to your Subversion repository, right? This has definitely seemed like a good idea to me, but it's only nice if you work in a small shop with only a few developers. Too many developers make this …
Posted on in Software
Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Mac OS Forge released MacPorts v1.5. If you aren't familiar with MacPorts, it's the reincarnation of DarwinPorts under the Mac OS Forge / Apple banner. For any UNIX admin, or serious OS X-er, MacPorts is an extensive collection of UNIX tools ported …
Posted on in Networking
Use Cisco ip helper-address deliberately: verify the default UDP broadcasts it forwards, keep DHCP working, and restrict only the protocols your topology does not need.
Posted on in Software
Anyone that has spent any time with Best Practical's RT: Request Tracker knows that it is a leader in the open-source ticketing system market. It is both robust and highly configurable. I've used several systems for incident, trouble, and bug tracking over the last 10+ years, but RT is by …
