One recent pet gripe of mine has been having to add a new VLAN into our datacenter for our vSphere platform. Not that I trust my DCs switches with puppet just yet, this is a proof of concept post about how we could be using puppet to centrally manage this configuration and push it out across our DC.
Before We’ve got a pretty basic topology going on in our DC, it’s just a VSS with the other switches pretty much being nothing more but layer 2 for the most part. … »
This article is about using the Asterisk PBX and exploiting Google’s voice recognition API built for voice search in Chrome to build an address book that technology inept people (my grandmother) can use to place cheap telephone calls over VoIP.
This tool is built for my grandmother; a lady who has macular degeneration making her legally blind. She doesn’t want to invest a great deal of money in this solution or have much of a learning curve, it took long enough to get her using the two button audio book solution on the iPod.
… »So lately I’ve been thinking about my backup strategy on my Mac. From previous posts you might know I’ve build my OpenIndiana ZFS FileServer. Well, just created a volume and decided to put 300GB to good use to create a time machine on my mac. There is a brilliant guide on how to do it here and suggest you all take a look (Thanks for the awesome guide Marco). … »
Just finishing off a few things at work this week. We’ve got a few sites around the place where we have HA internet powered by two Juniper SRX100’s. The Two SRX100’s operate in a Chassis Cluster and peer with our ISP using BGP across both active/passive devices.
Below is a little Nagios check script that I wrote to hook into our in-house Nagios monitoring platform. It makes sure the chassis cluster has not failed over operating in a degraded state, and makes sure that there are two BGP peers connected. … »
We all know the problem, some sites are restricted to certain countries based on the IP address you’re using to view them. When trying to access over-seas, some solutions are HTTP proxies, Socks proxies and the like. The problem I have with all of these is that they’re annoying to set up whenever you want to to view the site and I don’t want to have to do that for all my devices (iPad, computer, etc). … »
Setting up the Software Stack This article is the second in a series (see part 1 here). Please see HA Network for the first part in setting up the network topology to be highly available.
It’s all good having a redundant network design, but putting web servers and the like on our hypervisors doesn’t make them redundant. In the event where there’s a failure on one of our servers, all virtual machines on that server will die. … »
Introduction In one of my last little tasks at work, I was asked to eliminate single points of failure in the software and hardware stack without spending a fortune on hardware or software licenses. During the process of ensuring high availability (HA), I realized that many small companies might have similar need, but with more pressing tasks and limited man hours, without a post that talks about all the issues and solutions in one place, many companies and organisations tend to leave single points of failure living with the chance that they’re not going to fail any time soon. … »
EDIT: It looks like Google has recently starting peering in more places in AU with an anycast solution that fixes these issues.
On a little side note to the tutorial series I’ve been writing up lately for building a ZFS fileserver. This one is about Why Google DNS is bad for your performance (well, depending on where you live) A real quick run down, we all know what DNS does yeah? … »
Cifs Share CIFS (Common Internet File System), the protocol windows users for all it’s ‘windows file sharing’ is the method I’ll allow for my desktops and roaming computers to access files on the file server.
Before we begin, Make sure we install the CIFS kernal modules
1 # pkg install SUNWsmbs # pkg install SUNWsmbskr next we issue this command to make sure it auto starts
1 # svcadm enable -r smb/server I’ve decided for every day use, I want a data store on the server, so. … »
Note: This post is one in a series aimed to be a tutorial eventually, it’s not currently finalised and at the moment exists as a place for collating thought and collecting feedback
In part 1 of this blog post, I showed you how I created a script that would, when run, rotate your snapshots on a ZFS filesystem. For this to be usable, we need to create a mechanism for having it be automatically ran. … »