Exploring the wonders of life and IT
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 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 [...]
Part of my tasks for the Data center Move is to rack, build, config the networking equipment. We have racked 99% of the network equipment and are now configuring everything. Part of the problem is the network hasn’t been accurately planned and the Firewall rules are for the most part incomplete. We have a lot [...]
The company I work for is building out a cage for our equipment and I am heading off much of the planning and foot work. Thus I am unable to post as often since I have little to no free time. I will be posting images of the Datacenter changes soon.
Recently our Sr. Director of IT sent out a Calendar invite to the team for meetings to plan our major project. He sent this meeting to a few select developers and the Operations group. But when he sent to the Operations group, he didn’t expand the group and add each user. He added the Security [...]
After finding all the recommendations online to not work. I was forced to completely rebuild the system. This means since its a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with PERC6/i, I had to delete all RAID Virtual Disks. The reason for this was a glitch I had found when first installing the box some 5 months ago. If [...]