StaticNAT

Find yourself trying to decipher your Cisco CDR exports? Your not alone. I’ve got to give credit to some folks who helped me out – especially since I’m using Excel for MAC 2011.

Found this on Blindhog.net – smart guys!

Are you using Excel for MAC 2011 and find your year is off by 3?
You actually need to change the hack digits at the end of your formula from 25569 to 24107.
Check out this link.

Also, I was struggling with getting my human date and time to match that on www.epochconverter.com using the formulas above. It was off by 3 or 4 minutes. I found that if I removed the outermost set of parenthesis, then my formula actually matched the exact minute, as verified in the picture below.

Hope this helps some of you out rather quickly. Enjoy.
BTW, using the eastern time formula above, I was still off a little, so I simply added another hour (4*3600).

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!

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 »