The Value and Cost of Persistent Data
Jan 27th
I’ve been cleaning out my house recently. There’s a lot of crud that’s just been lying around, collected through years. My wife describes me as a level 2 hoarder; she says that I would be a shoe-in for that A&E show. Going through many, many boxes that I’ve collected in the basement, I pick through each cord and think “I might need that.” I won’t need it though, so with a small mental push, I put it in the trash bag. Persistent data is a lot like that. A lot of companies have, either through policy or inertia, tons of useless information sitting on disks, or tapes, or CDs, that may be useful one day, but probably will not ever be.
What is a WiFi Controller?
Jan 25th
Feature freeze
Jan 24th
Some of us took the time last week to create something new. I chose to challenge myself by designing a system I had not built before and that I am not ready to share… quite yet. :) But I do want to share something about the design process in very general terms.
The lesson I learned: Feature freeze is a good thing. Know when to stop fixing.
Now early in the project, I had a pretty good idea of what pieces needed to go together but I did not have a very good idea of how to get there. I put down a quick design and while I was doing that I started to see problems..
- Pieces did not fit together.
- Some things were missing.
- This was not going to work.
Time to start learning. I love learning.
Debugging IPSec VPNs in FortiGate
Jan 20th
Debugging IPSec VPNs in FortiGate
Debugging what is going wrong with a VPN setup is difficult. The IKE protocol is “chatty”, and negotiates back and forth between the two ends for several rounds. The GUI offers not much help, it is either UP or Down. Most of the real debugging happens inside the CLI.
One problem in particular that has always bugged me is that you need access to the end machines involved to initiate traffic across the link. The network admin typically doesn’t have direct access on the computers on either side of the VPN in order to initiate that traffic. I’ll show you a method that can be used to initiate traffic from that network as well.
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Clone-tastic!
Jan 20th
There are many things about virtualization is the ability to clone virtual machines. It’s really cool! Unfortunately, after you work with virtualization for a while you start to take it for granted. I can’t tell you how many times I roll out a new physical machine and sigh because I can’t simply clone it. Well, I can but that’s a discussion for another day.
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