slaptijack

Configure Cisco Catalyst DHCP snooping and Option 82 safely with a small pilot VLAN, explicit trusted uplinks, verification commands, and a rollback plan.

Someone looked over my shoulder the other day and was blown away by my MySQL client prompt.

(slap@localhost) [slaptijack]>

The boring default client just acknowledges that you are using MySQL and nothing more. This prompt indicates your username, the server you are working on, and the database you are …

How many times has this happened to you?

SLAP#write memory
startup-config file open failed (Device or resource busy)

If you work in an environment where multiple users have enable access on Cisco devices, you've probably seen it more than once. This particular error is caused when another user has …

This post relates to pre-Leopard versions of Mac OS X. Unfortunately, Leopard hosts that are configured via DHCP use the DHCP assigned DNS server before any statically configured servers. Check out the next post in this series to find the necessary tweaks for Leopard.

If you've been following along in …

If you've ever had to administer a Mac OS X system from afar, you know how difficult it can be to manage network settings. The Network Preference Panel under System Preferences is a great tool if you have remote access to the <acronym title="Graphical User Interface">GUI</acronym>, but …

While doing further research for my OS X Caching Only Name Server series, it has come to my attention that a couple of my methods (specifically relating to Startup Items and starting the daemon) are outdated. Although these methods may have been acceptable in pre-Tiger versions of OS X, Mac …

Welcome to post #100! Since this is a bit of a milestone, I thought I'd put up a super chart.

The image below shows the grow of RSS subscribers over the last 100 posts.

Although the growth is modest, I think its impressive considering this site has lived between Google …

This information is really geared for pre-Tiger versions of OS X. In OS X 10.4 (Tiger), the BIND daemon is controlled by launchd and is pre-configured (although disabled). BIND Startup in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) has more detailed information. Although outdated, this article still includes useful information …

Before we can start running BIND on OS X, we have to make a few configuration changes. Although BIND is pre-installed in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), it's not ready to run right out of the box. We've already created our Startup Item, but now we need to cleanup …

A legacy pre-launchd guide to creating a BIND Startup Item on early Mac OS X releases.

By default, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes with BIND 9 pre-installed and pre-configured to operate in caching-only mode. Unfortunately, the operating system is not configured to start the server at boot time, or even use the server if it was running. In this series of articles, we'll create …

By default, a BIND DNS server will report which version it is running to anyone that's interested. All it takes is a simple lookup of the version.bind text record in the chaos class of your server. Check this out:

Skadi:~ slap$ dig version.bind txt chaos @localhost

; <<>> DiG 9 …

It's recently come to my attention that a large percentage of the Slaptijack site has ended up in the dreaded "Google Supplemental Index". This means that key pages are not being served during normal searches. You can see which pages are in the Supplemental Index by running the following search …

DS3 (also known as T3) scrambling is not an issue that comes up very often. It's something every network administrator should know about, though. After all, it just might save your bacon.

Some physical layer protocols depend on the transition from 1 to 0 in a frame to maintain clocking …

Most network administrators should be familiar with Spanning Tree Protocol (STP; IEEE 802.1D). <acronym title="Spanning Tree Protocol">STP</acronym> is tasked with ensuring there are no loops in a bridged network. Unfortunately, STP is an older protocol and doesn't quite mesh with today's high speed networks. Here are …