[SDN Protocols] Part 5 – NETCONF
For those that followed my SDN Protocols series last summer, you might have noticed a missing entry: NETCONF. This protocol has actually existed for some time (the original now-outdated specification was published in 2006), but is appearing more often, especially in discussions pertaining to network automation. The current, updated specification - RFC6241 - covers a fairly large amount of material, so I will attempt to condense here. NETCONF operates at the management layer of the network, and therefore plays a role similar to that of OVSDB.[SDN Protocols] Part 5 – NETCONF
For those that followed my SDN Protocols series last summer, you might have noticed a missing entry: NETCONF. This protocol has actually existed for some time (the original now-outdated specification was published in 2006), but is appearing more often, especially in discussions pertaining to network automation. The current, updated specification - RFC6241 - covers a fairly large amount of material, so I will attempt to condense here. NETCONF operates at the management layer of the network, and therefore plays a role similar to that of OVSDB.OS X – Outlook Search “No Results”
The worst feeling for a geek:
Courtesy of xkcd (http://xkcd.com/979/)
This has happened to me twice now: upgrading Mac OS X from one release to another and after the dust settles, the search function in Outlook 2011 totally breaks and always returns “no results”. As we all know, email sucks and being able to deftly search through that mound of crap in your mail client is the only thing that makes it somewhat bearable.
When I upgraded from 10.8 to 10.9, I was the guy in the cartoon above. I had to resort to uninstalling and reinstalling all of Office to get this repaired. Urgh.
Well, I just upgraded from 10.9 to 10.10 and lo, the same problem with Outlook search. However this time my karma must be right topped off because I found the solution buried in a message board after an hour or so of searching.
Sweet, merciful help!
The post is from the macrumors.com forum and exactly described the issue and how to fix it on my machine. As stated, the permissions on my Microsoft Office 2011 directory allowed only my account to open the directory:
jknight@mac:~% ls -ld /Applications/Microsoft Office Continue reading2016 CCDE Practical Exam Dates
Cisco announced 2016 CCDE Practical exam dates. CCDE practical exam is organised only in every 3 months. Prerequisite for the exam is CCDE Written Qualification exam. You can attend the exam 4 times a year in a Professional Pearson Centers. I am planning to start my CCDE trainings 2 months before an announced exam date… Read More »
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Common Misconceptions about SDN
Andrew Lerner, my favorite Gartner blogger, published a great article documenting common SDN misconceptions. Not surprisingly, they're pretty much in line with what I've been ranting about for the last few years (including Whitebox Switching Is not SDN). Enjoy!OS X — Outlook Search “No Results”
The worst feeling for a geek:
Courtesy of xkcd (http://xkcd.com/979/)
This has happened to me twice now: upgrading Mac OS X from one release to another and after the dust settles, the search function in Outlook 2011 totally breaks and always returns “no results”. As we all know, email sucks and being able to deftly search through that mound of crap in your mail client is the only thing that makes it somewhat bearable.
CUCM 10.5 Upgrade issue
Hey everyone. I have just finished my upgrade to CUCM 10.5.2 and I faced an issue at the end of the ugprade. Of course this always happen after you spent some hours waiting for the upgrade to be successful According to the very good Cisco DocWiki, VMware Tools are specialized drivers for virtual hardware that […]Check Point – Upgrade Without Dropping Connections
Check Point firewall upgrades have always been painful. The loss of connection state is a big part of this. Existing connections stop working, and many applications need restart. It looks like there is a way of minimising this pain on upgrade.
Stateful firewalls record the current ‘state’ of traffic passing through, so they can recognise and allow reply or related traffic. If you have a firewall cluster, they need to synchronise state between the cluster members. This is so that if there is a failover, the new Active node will be aware of all connections currently in flight.
If you have a failover, and the standby member is NOT aware of current connection state, it will drop all currently open sessions. Any packet that isn’t a SYN packet will get dropped, and the applications need to establish new connections. Some applications handle this well – especially those that use many short-lived connections such as HTTP or DNS. But other applications that have long-running connections – e.g. DB connections – may struggle with this. They think the connection is still open, and take a long time to figure out it’s broken. They may eventually recover on their own, or they may Continue reading
CCIE sponsorship proposal example
Departing the lovely, sterile, electronic testing center after passing the final CCNP Route/Switch exam, and I’m on the way to the local pub to celebrate. You know what I’m already thinking about: gotta ride that wave, right? Stoke the flames, feet off the pedals down the hill, ride the momentum up the next, and all […]
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The post CCIE sponsorship proposal example appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by quingenerd.
HP IMC Silent Installation
HP IMC installation is normally a manual process, with plenty of clickey clickey clickey. This is OK for production systems, as most sites will only have one or maybe two IMC servers. But for my lab, I wanted to automate the install, so I can quickly spin up a new lab system. I have now found an undocumented, unsupported way of doing this.
There’s two parts to this – preparing the underlying OS & DB, and installing IMC. I am writing Ansible playbooks to handle the OS + DB setup. That’s working, but it needs a bit of cleanup. Once that’s done, I’ll integrate it with Vagrant. Then I should be able to completely automate the install of a lab IMC system. I will write another post on that once it’s complete.
To install IMC silently, create an “install.cfg” file to define your settings. Then tweak the installation script to call the silent installer, not the interactive install.
Note: I am using CentOS 6.x plus MySQL 5.6. With a few tweaks, this will probably work with Windows and/or other DBs. Also remember that this does not seem to be publicly documented anywhere. I’ve figured out how to do it through a bit Continue reading
Scraping data from a BT home hub 5
If you have BT broadband and want to graph the synced speed and actual use of your broadband connection, and you use the BT provided router (Home Hub), then you can’t use SNMP to get these counters. But you can get the data over HTTP without too much trouble. Here’s some ugly one-liners for doing that.
Current byte counters on the Internet interface (down/up)
curl -s 192.168.42.1/nonAuth/wan_conn.xml \
| sed -r '/wan_conn_volume_list/{N;s/.*\[.//;s/[^0-9]\],$//;s/%3B/ /g;s/^[0-9]+ ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+)$/\1 \2/g;p};d'
Current synced up speeds in bps (down / up)
curl -s 192.168.42.1/nonAuth/wan_conn.xml \
| sed -r '/status_rate/{N;s/.*\[.//;s/[^0-9]\],$//;s/%3B/ /g;s/^([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) [0-9]+ [0-9]+/\2 \1/g;p};d'
Misc note
First I tried this. And it appeared to work. But only if someone had logged in to the web UI recently.
curl -s 192.168.42.1/cgi/cgi_ad_B_Internet.js \
| sed -r '/wan_conn_volume_list/{N;s/.*\[.//;s/[^0-9]\],$//;s/%3B/ /g;s/.* ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+)$/\1 \2/g;p};d'
But then I try it on a different machine and… Oh… oh no. Oh say it ain’t so. Don’t tell me the BT home hub security is based on IP address? Oh… oh it is.
In conclusion
Yet another reason these routers are completely retarded. Other examples:
- Internal Continue reading
Scraping data from a BT home hub 5
If you have BT broadband and want to graph the synced speed and actual use of your broadband connection, and you use the BT provided router (Home Hub), then you can’t use SNMP to get these counters. But you can get the data over HTTP without too much trouble. Here’s some ugly one-liners for doing that.
Current byte counters on the Internet interface (down/up)
curl -s 192.168.42.1/nonAuth/wan_conn.xml
| sed -r '/wan_conn_volume_list/{N;s/.*[.//;s/[^0-9]],$//;s/%3B/ /g;s/^[0-9]+ ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+)$/1 2/g;p};d'
Current synced up speeds in bps (down / up)
curl -s 192.168.42.1/nonAuth/wan_conn.xml
| sed -r '/status_rate/{N;s/.*[.//;s/[^0-9]],$//;s/%3B/ /g;s/^([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) [0-9]+ [0-9]+/2 1/g;p};d'
Misc note
First I tried this. And it appeared to work. But only if someone had logged in to the web UI recently.
curl -s 192.168.42.1/cgi/cgi_ad_B_Internet.js | sed -r '/wan_conn_volume_list/{N;s/.*[.//;s/[^0-9]],$//;s/%3B/ /g;s/.* ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+)$/1 2/g;p};d'
But then I try it on a different machine and… Oh… oh no. Oh say it ain’t so. Don’t tell me the BT home hub security is based on IP address? Oh… oh it is.
In conclusion
Yet another reason these routers are completely retarded. Other examples:
- Internal databases Continue reading
SDxCentral News Roundup — March 27, 2015
Guess who's building a hypervisor! Also, Huawei backs ONOS and Red Hat cranks up virtual storage.