StaticNAT

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 the rest of this entry »

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!

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 the rest of this entry »

Ok so I have been beating my head on ASA to LDAP auth (temporary fix till my client spins up RADIUS) but thanks to the great LDAP group at Cisco TAC I”m up and working. The piont of this post is to take what we tend to know about LDAP client configs and adjust it for what Cisco has setup in PIX IOS 8. Read the rest of this entry »

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 the rest of this entry »