StaticNAT

Just wanted to get a new post up for those of you who check up on my little slice of the web. I am still alive but just buried in work and personal endeavors. One of those happens to be that my wife Patti is Pregnant with our second child. Currently she is about 8 weeks and our two year old Aidan keeps telling us he wants a baby sister. Today though I am finishing up a pseudo vacation and before I go back to my normal 60+ hour weeks I wanted to check up on my site metrics to see if my absence had cause staticnat.com to become another lost soul on the information super highway. I am thrilled to report that it has not. Between my few loyal readers and some new visitors not only have I seen pretty stable numbers but also some pretty unique visitors. The most unique has to be The DOD Network Information Center. As seen here in a capture of my analytics account you can see that two days in a row some folks at the DOD Network Information Center check out my site. They even hung around for a bit and read 3 of my pages. If it happened to be you that visited me from the DOD I would love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at; . That goes for all of my readers. While I don’t have tons of time to write at the moment I am very interested in what my readers are looking for when they visit me and what you would like me to add. I have hundreds of unique Cisco configs that I can sanitize and post as well as lots of other networking information, so if there is something you need drop me a line.

Again thanks for the continuing traffic and I hope to be supplying some new content and configs soon.

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The tech sector is an interesting place to work and play.  This is even more true in the high dollar high stakes world of Enterprise networking.  So often customers get locked into a vendor and just keep drinking that vendors coolaid after the first sip.  In cases where that vendor is Cisco it usually isn’t a bad thing (”No one gets fired for buying Cisco!”) but it could be a very costly thing for your organization to focus on a vendor instead of a vendors core competencies and it standings in a particular market.  In doing research on competitive products to the Cisco MARS platform I stumbled across this site of cool links for competitive reviews of Cisco products versus other vendors products.  As with all “third party” testing you need to take these results with a grain of salt (most of these were commissioned by the competitor) but I’m sure there is some good info to be found.  Enjoy this link.

Any one who has tried to run Cisco’s ASDM (ASA Security Device Manager) with an IPS unit installed and running probably already know where this is going. Under Configuration and IPS your a provided a link that connects the broswer windows (ASDM) to the management interface of the IPS SSM module for the ASA. From there you are presented with ASA like login which is where the problems begin. If your are running the default java config the IPS screen will crash stating that you do not have enough memory allocated for java. In both Windows and Linux the solutions for this are pretty straight forward. In OS X however much searching and digging did not reveal the magic spot to change the memory settings. Thats where I come in.
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I was on client site today troubleshooting some bandwidth problems. The first issue ended up being a power outage the night before had kept the edge router from coming up clean. A reload and a quick check of the config and life was good again. Currently this particular edge site for the client only has 1Mbit of their T1 and the rest is dedicated to their phone system. After being down a good portion of the morning the data link really took a hit when we got things working as email came flying in and everyone rushed our to see how their Ebay bids were going. So getting back from lunch we noticed that the link was still fully committed. The traffic pattern in PRTG indicated that it was some sort of update stream (we have fought this battle before) but with Apple Update servers blocked we were pretty sure it was not the Mac (95% of all systems on this network). However based on the network it was on and the location within that network we were left without other options.
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I was mowing my yard yesterday and trying to catch up on my podcasts. One of my favorites is Diggnation, which is hosted by Kevin Rose the founder of Digg and his Friend Alex Albrecht. This is a great podcast if you want to keep up with current culture as welll as current technology from about a 10,000 ft view. Anyway at the end of the show they mentioned Tubes. Tube is a product that acts like an IM client but also allows you to create custom P2P networks for your IM Friends. What is even cooler is that fact that you have lots of granular access control over the files once they end up in your online-share. Products like Hamachi were able to do this by creating a PC to PC VPN then allowing file sharing between the PC’s but that was cludgy. This is the whole package in one client. So far its a Win32 only app but they are working on a OS X version and I would guess a linux version also. With 2 Gig of free storage this could be a killer app for small companies and distributed work forces.  Anyway not going to go on an on about it but check out Tubes this could be the next big thing.

Thanks JohnWaynesteeth!! I’m sure I wont see the light of the front page but 5 diggs is 5 readers I didn’t have before. Thanks for the support guys!

read more | digg story

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.
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Back on March 19th of this year I posted, “Three weeks in two, bah who needs sleep.”, I must have lied because between those two weeks and the subsequent crazy weeks following I pretty much fell off the map. During the aforementioned two weeks though I visited Ottawa, Canada for Sales and Engineering training for CryptoCard. For me trips like this are exciting not for the trip but for the time I get to spend with other professionals learning, hanging out and passing on our tricks to each other. During a break on the training routine our instructor Patrick posed a question something to the affect of; if we don’t like spam and attacks and we know that 20 to 30% of all spam and attacks come from North Korea and China then why don’t we block them at the edge?
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Not much to say here. This points to Cisco’s site. I just got tired of googling it. Enjoy.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/474/pswdrec_3600.shtml

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I can tell from my traffic stats that there are people out there checking things out here at StaticNAT I can also clear see how my inability to post lately has helped my numbers to tank. I never planned on this to be a huge site and my primary income so the numbers don’t kill me. But I can say there there is something exciting to watch the graph in Google Analytics rise as well as equally disappointing when the numbers drop. To avoid this emotional roller coaster I have enlisted the help of a friend who is a great systems administrator. You could soon be seeing posts by AppleEvangelist. Both AppleEvangelist and I spend a large portion of our time in a mixed OS X (server and desktop) and Windows environment (XP and 2003 Server) but it leans heavily towards the OS X side. This systems environment I refer to is clearly a small Enterprise environment. With more than 20 edge sites currently connected via serial T1s but soon to be connected via metro-Ethernet around 50 servers, hundreds of switches and an expanding security structure this is a very unique environment to be a Mac user in.
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