slaptijack

For those that have been using Cisco IOS 12 forever, you may not have realized that Cisco has begun rolling out IOS 15. Although there are a lot of technical changes and features that are being introduced, IOS 15 introduces a new licensing scheme that may throw old users for …

Occasionally, you may run across a date in a format that can't be easily loaded into a Python date object. For example, I recently had a situation where a file I was parsing was full of dates in this format: 7/7/2008.

The obvious thing to do here is …

If you're using a non-standard MySQL data directory on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server, you may have seen an error like /usr/libexec/mysqld: Can't change dir to '/mysql_data/' (Errcode: 13). The key to fixing this problem is to ensure the new MySQL data directory has the proper …

Oracle's VirtualBox 3.2.10 was released today. This another maintenance release for 3.2 that includes a wide variety of bug fixes. Check out the Changelog for more details.

I use VirtualBox on both my Macs for my various testing needs. If you've got a favorite desktop virtualization program …

The Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have announced through their respective websites that all applications selected to receive a reward under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 have been notified. This officially concludes the application and selection process. For those of us …

In Asterisk 1.4 and above, you can dynamically add and remove queue members from an extension or the command-line interface (CLI). Although you will most likely do most of your adding and removing via extensions, you might also find it helpful to remove a queue member by hand on …

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has released a white paper detailing how SIRVA Inc., owner of Allied and North American Van Lines, used VMware vSphere and HP hardware to reduce their physical server count by 88%.

In addition to the cost savings associated with the drastic reduction in physical servers, SIRVA also managed …

Recently I was working on some old code. One of my model methods was originally written such that if one parameter was set to the Python None type, a particular set of actions would occur. For some reason, I checked for None like this:

if parameter is None:
    do something …

As I mentioned the other day, I'm building a RADIUS client in Python for sending disconnect messages to Cisco routers.

One hang-up with the pyrad package is that it requires a dictionary file in order to map RADIUS attribute names to codes and types. In the case of my client …

I've been working on a RADIUS client in Python that can send a disconnect message (packet of disconnect) to a Cisco router. I'm using pyrad 1.2 for the project.

I ran into this problem pretty quickly:

POD: 192.168.9.9 request queued
POD: Illegal authenticator in POD from …

While doing some testing with Cisco Access Registrar (CAR) 5.0, I noticed that the test user had hundreds of old sessions hanging around:

--> query-sessions /r with-User X
Sessions with-User X for /Radius
  Sessions for /Radius/SessionManagers/session-mgr-1:
    S432 Key: 04000000000CF660, NAS: NAS.slaptijack.com, NAS-Port: 0, User-Name: X, Time …

Users of Citrix XenServer 5.6 are experiencing a problem where the cdrommon process begins consuming all CPU resources and affecting virtual machine performance. Using 'top' or 'ps auwx' from dom0 shows that the process is consuming 99% or more CPU resources. Users of Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) 0.5 …

>>> print "".join(" hello   world ".split())
helloworld

The key to the above is that split() separates the string on any amount of whitespace when no separator is specified.

Engineering firm CH2M Hill recently began moving away from VMware ESX to Microsoft's Hyper-V. CH2M Hill has been using VMware technology since 2005, but recently began the push toward Hyper-V in an effort to increase savings through more virtualization. The engineering firm believes it will save over \$280,000 in …

In a test lab, we ran into a situation where the connection between our Cisco Access Registrar (AAA) server and MySQL server was timing out. This forced the server to reconnect and resulted in the following errors:

 name/radius/1 Error Server 0 ODBC client (DataSource 'my_odbc', Connection 8): SQLExecute …