Cisco Live

July 8th, 2010 · The Fraser · Personal No comments

Went to Cisco Live last week. One of the best conferences I have been to. So much information that can directly apply to many of the challenges we have at work that I have to take some time to mull it over. I will be posting some interesting findings I have soon.

  • Nexus 5k/2k hardware is quite intriguing and if you change the way you think of a traditional simple deployment can be quite useful
  • Nexus 7k has a fabric that is ridiculously fast and wide (fabric is in the hundreds of TBps not GBps)
  • How to squeeze more out of your MARS
  • ASA Firewall design considerations
  • How to get rid of Spanning-Tree and all its problems

Anyways I need to get back to work…

Goals and Growth

May 2nd, 2010 · The Fraser · Personal, Photography 5 comments

Starting this year I was planning on participating in a few online projects regarding blog posting and photography. I was hoping to try and force some normalcy into my life via these projects, basically pursue some hobbies. As you may have noticed that hasn’t happened as of yet. I still want to post more blogs and take more photos. But recovering mentally from having a single mindset for almost a full year has been harder than I expected.

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New year, New Endeavors

January 1st, 2010 · The Fraser · Personal One comment - Tags: , ,

Greetings everyone,

As it has been a busy and productive first day of the year I am just now getting to my first of the year blog post. I have a few goals to be completed this year and some projects that I would like to participate in.

Project 52

For the past year I have been less that consistent with blog posts. In hopes of learning to be more communicative with the world and to increase my ability to talk clearly I thought it would be helpful to write more. Now as I am an Systems & Network Administrator 99% of my posts will be around my industry and the things that I am studying. But I will try to breathe some life into my posts and not make the soo technical.

Project 365

I have realized that over the past year I have experienced my first year of marriage and I dont really remember much of it. I have been nose down in work and have not really been able to embrace and enjoy the first year. By enjoy I mean I dont remember much of it without my wife reminding me. So I thought I would try out this project 365 to document something that happens to be me everyday so that at the end of the year I can remember the smaller joys of life and not just the big things. I am using Flickr for this so look me up there (I also have a picasa album, I might keep some larger libraries here.

Lastly I thought I would throw in some things I want to do this year

New Years Resolutions:

1) Go to Tahoe for Vacation

2) Go to Iowa and visit friends out in Ames

3) Get my High Blood Pressure under control

4) Chart my productivity and health

5) Take some Photography classes

6) Start completing my degree (Its not going to be completed in a year but I want to start soon)

7) Go hiking and camping at least twice this year.

8) Not have to make up another resolution just so that I have an even number of resolutions….

Thats about it, I shall talk to ya soon.

Short post: Most important command I always forget

December 30th, 2009 · The Fraser · Linux Administration, Systems Administration No comments - Tags: ,

Often times in the heat of a critical server restart the system decides to FSCK a very large filesystem. If I let it take its natural course it could be a day before its back (for 12TB file systems using ext3). So to stop it from fscking follow this procedure.

1) Restart system
2) When it begins FSCKing, it will start running a percentage counter. Crtl-C from this. It will dump you to Repair Filesystem mode
4) Once in repair after entering the root password you will need to edit fstab to comment out the partition. This fails as it is unable to edit the file as its Read-Only.
3) Run the command “mount -o remount /” or to be absolutely sure “mount -n -o remount,rw /”
4) Comment out the partition in /etc/fstab and restart the box.
5) Once the box has recovered uncomment the partition and mount it.
6) Schedule downtime for the box for fscking.

This doesn’t take into consideration the negative affects of running an ext3 filesystem without fsck for that long a period and cheating to get around it. But there are times when things just have to be fixed ASAP, this comes in handy.

RANCID and MultiContext Firewalls

September 1st, 2009 · The Fraser · Network Administration 3 comments - Tags:

I have deployed RANCID, a popular open-source network device config backup utility, in our environment. It works great especially when configured to svnsync to a master repository. The recent trouble I have found is RANCID doesnt support multi-context firewalls. There is no way to configure RANCID to detect multi-context mode, go to each context and download the config. Changing the Firewall so that each context has an admin address is seriously not going to work. So my only resolution was to create a script.

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Movie Review: Moon

July 21st, 2009 · The Fraser · Movie Reviews One comment - Tags: ,

So I have been having trouble lately finding things to blog about that aren’t mundane and boring. I also cant spend all day writing about the things I do at work, not enough time to write the posts… So I saw this great movie recently, Moon and I am going to write about that.

Moon
Moon

The movie revolves around the life of an Astronaut Sam Bell working on a Lunar mining facility. He signed a contract for a 3 year stint working mining H3 (Tritium/Hydrogen 3). This is the new fuel source of the future which powers the Fusion plants of the US and abroad. The movie spends all but the last 5-10 minutes centralized around 2 characters, Sam and the automated System GERTY (Kin of the HAL 9000 from 2001: space Odyssey). The glory of this movie is in its simplicity. There is no alien or supernatural phenomenon, the director is leading us through the last 2 weeks of Sam’s contract as he is introduced to a very awkward and perplexing situation.

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Cisco Console Server

May 24th, 2009 · The Fraser · Network Administration No comments - Tags: , , ,

In an effort to provide a more secure way to access our network equipment in the event of an outage we setup a console server. We didnt purchase anything from a vendor but built a Cisco Console server. There is little documentation for creating this online so I am going to go through the steps of creating one.

Equipment used: below is the list of equipment needed to get started with the project

  1. Cisco 2621xm router
  2. NM-32a Async network module
  3. cab-octal-sync Async octal set of cables (68pin connector terminated with 8 RJ45 async console ports)
  4. cat5 cables of appropriate length and color (In my environment, color signifies function. This may not apply in your setup)

Connectivity Setup:

To start we are going to setup the devices, power it and assume the switches have been setup appropriately.

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Busy Life, New Project

April 6th, 2009 · The Fraser · Linux Administration, Network Administration One comment

I haven’t posted in awhile as life is pretty busy. I am almost done with the DataCenter Migration and we are greatly busy with looking for a Condo in the Bay Area (Perfect time to Buy). We found one condo that we are really interested in but it already has a few offers on it. So we can just hope and pray that they all fall through. My Wife got a new job recently too. Lawyers Assistant for a law firm, working her way to a Paralegal.

As for my new project, I am going to start working on a IT Assets Database. Mostly for the server side. This will be used to inventory all servers, predict average power consumption per server and site and hopefully find a good way to integrate it into a PXE/Kickstart setup. I have a few ideas on  the most efficient way to do this. I also partially want to the develop this as a Rails/Ruby app. I may end up developing a PHP app first as the guys here are so afraid of Ruby & Rails.

Updates will be more frequent in the future as work is slowing down a bit and the project is coming to a close.

Quick Post – DataCenter Pics

February 25th, 2009 · The Fraser · Personal, Systems Administration No comments

We have been working on building/migrating to a new DC for the past few months and this week the work has really started. I dont have pics of the latest systems I have racked, but the below photos are from earlier this month. I will be posting more photos as the building goes on. Currently I am only able to use the camera on my phone, so you are stuck with so-so quality.

Enjoy,

[picasa width="400" height="400" autoplay="0" showcaption="1"]http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronmfraser/DataCenterPics[/picasa]

Change Java Heap Size on a Mac

February 13th, 2009 · The Fraser · Systems Administration No comments

I do a lot of work with the Cisco ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance). The GUI interface relies on Java for any non-windows hosts. If you by chance have an ASA with an IPS module installed you will receive a Java Heap Size is too small error. To fix this error I have found no way on the mac to do this globally. So I edited the info.plist for the application that I was working on.

If you pop open the plist into an editor and make the following changes:


<key>jnlpx.heapsize</key>
<string>67108864,536870912</string>
.....
<key>VMOptions</key>
<array>
<string>-Xms67108864</string>
<string>-Xmx536870912 </string>

You shouldn’t run into the Heap Size issue again. #Note: this change only affects the app that you configured, this is not a global change.