David Chidell - The Null Route (Page 3)

Code / syntax highlighting in Ghost

Problem As I write more and more of these posts I realise that I am using snippets of code here and there more and more frequently. Ghost (the CMS this blog runs) has support for some code insertions, however is generally fairly poor. I wanted to see if I could

VMware

Bulk NTP Configuration for vCenter'd ESXi hosts

Problem You've got a vCenter environment with many ESXi hosts, and for some reason they've not been set up correctly to the point where the time differences are massive across the board, no consistency etc etc. We can fix that with NTP! But, it's a proper nightmare having to configure

Cisco

Cisco DMVPN @ home

Problem You're a bit of a networking nerd, you've got a Cisco router at home but perhaps you also have one at your parents house...maybe a friend has one as well and eventually you've got a whole load of different networks you've got to look after. Wouldn't it be

Cisco

Cisco IOS SSL WebVPN

Problem You're away from home, but want to grab something from your file server, perhaps you want to change some configuration on a box? How? Well, you could port forward everything you need but that opens up lots of security holes. A more practical solution is a VPN. So, what's

Cisco

Cisco 897 tinkering

Introduction Usually these blog posts are about me solving a problem. And this is no exception, however I'm afraid I'm going to throw a bit of opinion in here as well this time. So, what's this all about? This beauty right here: (Images found on ebay) These boxes are exceptional

Storage

Modifying Transmission plugin settings in FreeNAS (CLI)

Problem FreeNAS makes an excellent NAS system, and one of the reasons for this is the capability to integrate plugins for particular features rather than having separate servers. These plugins run in lightweight containers called jails, these are isolated environments which share the same filesystem as the parent. As such,

Cisco

Re-imaging Cisco Access Points

Problem Every time I need an access point and pick one up it always seems to be on the wrong version to what I need. Not just wrong version in terms of code, but version as in lightweight (controller based) or autonomous (standalone, no controller integration). While I've become rather

Powershell

Useful PowerCLI / PowerShell Snippts

Unlike my usual Problem / Solution posts, this post will be updated with helpful PowerCLI pieces I've found during my time picking apart the PowerCLI cmdlet reference! Get Total Host Info (CPU / Memory) This snippet retrieves the CPU and memory of every ESXi host in the cluster and displays the total

VMware

vCenter Network Automation with PowerCLI

Problem Ever needed to migrate VMs between vCenter servers but been tied down due to VM networking? Hopefully the solutions provided here will help alleviate the problem. If you've got a large vCenter environment using VMware Distributed Switches (VDS) it's an absolute nightmare to move to a new vCenter server.

Cisco

Sky ADSL Broadband with a Cisco router

Problem Consumer routers suck, plain and simple. Personally I'm used to the rich features Cisco routers provide. Of course, I am biased, however it seems a common goal to get broadband connections working on Cisco routers. ADSL connections are a pain, they're usually finicky and difficult to troubleshoot. This post

VMware

ESXi - vCenter connection behind NAT.

Problem I've recently had the requirement to put a NAT router performing NAT overload between an ESXi server and it's respective vCenter server. According to VMware this is an unsupported configuration but of course since when is anything I do supported anyway...if it's technically possible, go for it! In

Linux

Nginx Proxy with Virtual Hosts / Server Blocks

Background: I have an amazing home internet connection, with 1G up and down. This is perfect for hosting my own servers at home. As a result I run an ESXi host with many VMs. My standard process is to spin up a new VM for each service that I run,

VMware

VMware vCenter 5.5 database size

Problem: I hit a problem with a vCenter server (linux appliance) I look after where I simply could not log into the vCenter client. Upon investigating the vpxd service was not running, and looking at the disk usage using a df -h showed that the /storage/db partition was 100%

Cisco

Cisco 9971 IP Phone with FreePBX / Asterisk

Introduction So I finally bothered to get it working - a cisco telepresence series 9971 IP phone with the following capabilities: Extension to extension calling (Ok, any phone system can do this) Voicemail Video chat (to the same model of phone) Inbound calling (from PSTN) Outbound calling (to PSTN) Custom

Misc

Squid3 Upstream Proxy with HTTPS

Problem Using squid as a proxy is useful in a situation where a lab does not have internet access, however sometimes it is necessary to use an upstream proxy. In my case my proxy is bridging two networks to allow internet access from one into the other, however the network

Misc

Ixia IxNetwork Packetloss Duration

Problem When testing convergence times packet loss duration is a useful attribute to have. One implementation is to use a static packet rate for example 1000 frames per second and note the number of packets lost and calculate the duration. However this can be done inside ixia itself but is

New blog!

I've been meaning to do this for a while - however never got around to it. It's about time I found somewhere to put all those little things you encounter on a day-to-day basis however never seem to remember them next time they're encountered. However no longer. This blog will