Category: Network Management

Seven more reasons Packetlife.net ROCKS!

Stretch over at Packetlife goes above and beyond when it comes to practical network blogging.  Even more he publishes insanely good cheet sheets that I print, laminate and carry with me every day.  Often a customer will have a question and I pull out the handy cheet sheet and just leave it with them.  So today Strech posted Seven Free ways to improve your networks security so click through to it and do these things TODAY!  So often it is the little things that bite us in the ass when it comes to security and while letting just one little thing slip through is bad enough, so often we are lettting lots of little things through.  So start here and lets lockdown the tubes baby!

Upon us all a little rain must fall.

Led Zeppelin said it best I guess.  This past week Ohio along with lots of other states got hit with the remains of hurricane Dean.  So far it has been the most damaging storm for my clients in my short consulting career.  The first call came on Tuesday morning August 21st.  That call was from one of our account managers who indicated a client had sustained catastrophic damage to their 6509 when water rushed into their core network closet.  My first two thoughts were how quickly can we get replacement hardware and how long should it take for me to get them back up and going? Read more

Cacti on Ubuntu 7.04, 8 steps to the a flexible and functional setup.

I’m going to make this quick and to the point. Look for details in my upcoming post “Cacti the killer monitoring app? I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server and Cacti in some form more than 18 times in the past two weeks. Most of those have been a frustrating failure! I am by no means a *nix god so most of my problems probably had to do with not knowing the ins and outs of the Ubuntu OS. My failures can probably also be directly attributed to a lack of 7.04 install guides for cacti. So with so many failed attempts and 3 Fully successful attempts both on HP hardware, Dell Hardware and a VM Ware server Virtual Machine I am going to post my 8 basic steps to making cacti work. Read more

My thoughts on “How I Hacked Your LinkSys Router Which You Probably Bought at Best Buy”

From a Network Engineer’s point of view this is exactly what is wrong with todays home networking methodology. Every night when I get home from work I follow the same rough routine. I plop down on the couch power on my laptop and connect to my home network via wireless. After doing so I check my connection logs for the day to my AP, my overall bandwidth usage via PRTG and my syslog server messages from my firewall. I do this to ensure that all is well on my little spoke of the internet. But I know for a fact that those of us who perform this little daily dance are in the minority. Instead what you get is scores of people purchasing wireless routers and just throwing them on their cable or DSL modem and going on with life, like they didn’t just leave their front door open with a big neon WELCOME HACKERS sign over it. Read more