slaptijack

I have a fairly lightly loaded MySQL server with a few tables that are updated every five minutes. Other than these updates, there are very few queries run against the database. The data is queried just a few times per month. Ever so often, one of the more complicated queries …

Here are a few tips that might be helpful if you are having trouble accessing your Cisco router or switch via the web server.

• Make sure you have the right password! This is pretty obvious, but it's definitely the first thing worth checking.
• If you're using aaa new-model, you will …

I don't know why SELinux problems seem so frustrating. The problem almost certainly is related to the fact that there is frequently no error message. This is exactly the problem I ran into while turning up a new Apache web server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6) with SELinux …

If you need to disable spanning-tree on a particular VLAN in your Cisco-based network, use the following command:

Switch(config)# no spanning-tree vlan 13

This will disable spanning-tree on unlucky VLAN 13.

If you have some good examples of why you might want to disable spanning-tree for a VLAN, please …

While researching a problem with our Oracle Fast Recovery Area (FRA), I took note of the more useful commands I used. This is from Oracle 11g R2 with the Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) options.

SQL*Plus

Show how much of the FRA is in use …

After a recent power event, I experienced this problem. None of our iPods were appearing in iTunes; even those that sync via wireless. My problem was solved on the macosxhints forums by sprale.

In Terminal:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/SyncServices/
rm Local

If you aren't comfortable in Terminal, you will …

Not everyone has a great password maintenance process. If you run into a situation where the group pre-shared keys for your VPN are lost, you face the option of changing the existing key (and breaking any users that are currently working), or creating a new group with a new key …

If you are unfamiliar with Oracle and setting up your vCloud Director Oracle database, don't make the same mistake I made:

SQL> CREATE TABLESPACE "CLOUD_DATA" DATAFILE "/home/oracle/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/cloud_data01.dbf" SIZE 1000M AUTOEXTEND ON ;
CREATE TABLESPACE "CLOUD_DATA" DATAFILE "/home/oracle/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/cloud_data01.dbf …

On occasion, you may need to put your Cisco IPS into bypass mode. Bypass mode allows the IPS to pass traffic without inspecting it. This may be useful if you suspect the IPS is causing a problem, if you are going to run a one-time scan that would set the …

When you get your brand new Cisco ASR1000 series router, Stateful Switchover (SSO) is disabled by default:

Router# show redundancy states
       my state = 13 -ACTIVE 
     peer state = 1  -DISABLED 
           Mode = Simplex
        Unit ID = 6
Redundancy Mode (Operational) = Non-redundant
Redundancy Mode (Configured)  = Non-redundant
Redundancy State              = Non Redundant

Enable SSO!

Router# config …

I recently needed to tag the first 5,389 messages in a mailbox using Mutt. This is much easier than you might think.

1. shift-t - By default, the command to tag messages based on a pattern is bound to shift-t. If you've changed this in your muttrc, use whatever you've bound …

You've certainly noticed when look at individual BGP routes on your Cisco routers that the route is advertised to specific update-groups. It isn't obvious from that output just what those update-groups are.

Router#show ip bgp 8.8.8.8       
BGP routing table entry for 8.8.8.0/24 …

If you need to comment something out of your .vimrc, start the line with a double quote (").

"autocmd BufRead *.xml :source ~/.vimrc.xml

It's embarrassing to admit how long it takes to find the answer to that question.

When I upgraded to OS X 10.7 (Lion), I started using the built-in IPSec VPN client rather than Cisco's VPNClient. I experienced problems immediately. At first it appeared that the connection was being made, but no traffic was passing. When I tried pinging by IP address, I found that …