Category: *NIX

Fake it till ya make it!

So no one who is reading this should be in the dark about some of the interesting things I have been doing as of late.  But if you are here is a quick re-cap.

Language Access Network my employer is undergoing an installation of a first of its kind Video Call Center.  I will more on that to write soon.  As part of this process we had a WHOLE LOT of infrastructure put into place.  For starters we needed a “SAN”, we needed Servers, we needed DC Switching and we needed lots and lots of licensing and that all before the developers and engineers jump in to make the whole thing work.  The cool bits of this first part are what we did for “SAN”, Server and Network.  As you all know I am a past Cisco UCS zealot and I have a NetApp in my basement so you would think that it would be simple math as to what I would have installed.  You would be right.  UCS and NetApp were about $100,000 more than I could scrape out of my budget and still have anything left for other major components.  Before people get bent out of shape about me saying Cisco UCS and NetApp are to expensive, I did not say that.  Honestly I think within existing DC platforms they are both very well priced if you don’t bring next gen platforms into the mix.  In my case the next gen platform is Nutanix.  If you don’t know anything about these guys click the link and check them out.

In a nutshell Nutanix is 4 Blades of Compute and 20TB of Storage in a 2RU chassis with FusionIO, SSD and SAS Drives and no common backplane between the 4 nodes.  Along with my four pod node we added Arista 7124SX as our DC Switching/Fabric.  There are lots of details around this combination like currently Nutanix does not support using the Node for a bare metal server like you can do with UCS or other Blade Enclosures and the storage has limited access to the outside world (it is setup to presented to ESXi Hosts as iSCSI targets and VMs as ViSCSI targets) but so far I love the platform.  It gave me what I needed in the price point I needed and offers huge scale out options considering it is based of the GFS files system that Google uses across their DC’s. Read more

Been a good day. Got me some getlibs!

So on my personal laptop (Dell Lattitude D630) I installed Ubuntu 64bit 9.10. I did this for two reasons.

  1. This is the same laptop I have for work and it is safer to mess with this one and know that it works then the one I have to use every day.
  2. I really want my family to get away from Windows OS’s as their only option.  So now the wife works every day with an Open Source OS and that is cool!

One of the huge annoyances so far with 64-bit has been that adobe applications just as air don’t seem to like the 64-bit binaries and libraries.  For me this has sucked because I am a HUGE fan of TweetDeck.  I use my Twitter account as a gateway to other IT professionals and entrepreneurs all over the world.  So not having my goto platform for Twitter working at home as sucked.

So this afternoon I took a few minutes and did what I have done at least 5 other times in the past few months and and I Googled “TweetDeck in 64-bit Linux” and today it returned GOLD!  http://www.ossramblings.com/tweetdeck_in_64_bit_ubuntu .

I wan to say a bit thanks to Tony for doing his homework on this and helping the rest of us cheat and get it working.  Also wanted to post the link for more info on getlibs .  If you are going to play with 64-bit linux understand what getlibs can do for you.

Hope this helps some folks and enjoy!

I put my bird in Fort Knox…go on try to steal it.

If you follow staticnat then you will know that I recently started a new job.  They issued me a new Dell Latitude D630 including the upgraded video card.  This was  bit a of a change since I have been using a Macbook exclusively for the past two years.  What I learned to love about the the Macbook was the strength of the underling OS and its elegant GUI for day to day use.  Knowing my OS opt out of the Win32 world and take the dive into Linux as my primary work environment.  This was easy enough considering my laptop came installed with WinXP and the Ubuntu 7.10 installer CD does a great job creating a dual boot system with minimal hassle to the end user. Read more

Captain the warp subsystems are down what should we do?!!!

Over the last two years I have become quite the Mac/OSX fan.  For years I was down on apple and to this day think I had every right to be.  But with OS 10.4 and now 10.5 they have created a powerful and flexible unix distribution for the general user and the power users.  However I have from time to time notices funky issues with software such as the Cisco IpSec VPN client.

Most recently in 10.5.1 I kept getting the VPN subsystem could not be contacted.  Well here is the fix from nate,

“If you are running Cisco’s VPNClient on Mac OSX, you might be familiar with (or tormented by) “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem”. The simple fix is to quit VPNClient, open a Terminal window, (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and type the following:
sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart
and give your password when it asks. This will stop and start the “VPN Subsystem”, or in other words restart the CiscoVPN.kext extension.”

Thanks Nate and I hope this help everyone else out there keep their WARP core under control….later!

Always Flush when your done!!!

One of my clients has had their web server exposed to the wild world of the internet now for several years. Up till about a year and a half ago many systems on their network actually had IP ANY ANY statements cut through from the Outside of their Firewall to the Inside. However it has been one of my many jobs since I started with them to eradicate these problems and start securing their infrastructure. The firewall changes have been easy for the most part and any problems that remain are policy issues that we are working to eliminate. However their web server sitting outside of the firewall has been an ongoing issue and due to some anomaly’s on the server they are deploying the recommended DMZ and migrating their web server there. 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