Archive for the ‘linux’ Category

Creating a DOS USB bootdisk under linux

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Every now and then I need a DOS bootdisk to flash a BIOS or similar, and I only have linux with which to create it. I can never remember the quickest way to do this, so I'm documenting it here: Lifted entirely from this webpage. I'm only archiving it here because ...

Changing Putty’s right-click behaviour

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Anyone who uses Putty a lot will inevitably accidentally paste something into their putty window due to Putty's right-click to paste default behaviour, often resulting in pasting relatively embarassing content like SQL that should never be seen in daylight, or at least a customer's root password. However, I found this putty ...

QOS and IP Accounting with BGP under linux

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

At NSP we've go a fibre connection into the building, and a 10MBit feed from our ISP, and over that we're allowed 10MBit of national and 3 Mbit PIR of international traffic. Note that this adds up to more than 10Mbit in total! This can cause annoying problems, like ...

Exporting Tape Autoloaders via iSCSI

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

A while ago I posted about {{post id="iscsi-for-scsi-device-passthrough-under-xen-enterprise" text="exporting a tape drive via iSCSI"}} to enable windows VMs to backup to a SCSI tape drive under Citrix Xenserver. I spent a couple of hours googling for whether or not you could do the same thing with a tape ...

Why I love dmidecode

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

I was asked to provide more ram for a server today, specified only by name. I have login details, but it's in a datacentre in Auckland, and I'm in Hamilton, so I can't wander over to check details. Enter dmidecode: [code] ... System Information Manufacturer: Dell ...

Further bugs in switches

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Further to my {{post id="opennms-and-bugg-switches" text="previous post"}} on the topic of uncovering bugs in switches with network monitoring systems, I have two more bits of news: The first is that the vendor has given me a new firmware for one of the switch models which fixes the bug. Apparently it was ...

OpenNMS and buggy switches

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

One of my evening projects has been setting up OpenNMS to monitor a network primarily comprised of VENDORNAME switches. OpenNMS is being put in to replace a bundle of Nagios, Cacti, Smokeping, and Groundwork Fruity for Nagios configuration management. The existing system worked well enough, but the lack of autodiscovery ...

Weird autoblogs

Friday, July 4th, 2008

I just got a pingback on my earlier post, which was from a blog that indexes posts and articles with a particular word - acceptance - in it. Kind of an odd premise for a blog. UPDATE As per the comment, the author/owner of More Lyrics updated his blog to remove ...

Citrix on Xen

Friday, July 4th, 2008

It seems that the original subject of my post yesterday caught the eyes of much of the virtualisation community, including Simon Crosby, formerly from Xensource, and now working for Citrix. He's written a typically well thought out response, which covers off a lot of points: HP have a multi-hypervisor management tool already ...

Citrix Xenserver: Xen or Hyper-V? Does it matter?

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Seems there's a bit of debate at the moment about the future of Xen within Citrix's product range, all sparked by this article by Brian Madden, which he clarified later on. Brian's followup clarifies his point: When I say that Citrix will drop Xen, I mean that Citrix will drop the ...