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The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

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The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

Choose your weapon

The dual serial adapter above is my weapon of choice. You can pick one up for about £20 on Amazon(not an affiliate link). Generally speaking, I’ve had better experience with FTDI chipsets so if you are in the market for an adapter, I’d recommend checking the chipset first…

Driver Installation

For FTDI

1. Download the FTDI VCP driver for OSX
2. Install the drivers

For Prolific

1. Download the drivers from here
2. Install the drivers

A quick note on terminal emulation in OSX

Most likely you have used a USB-serial adapter in Windows. When installed It appears as a COM port, you point TeraTerm or HyperTerminal to that COM port and everything automagically works. In Continue reading

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BeagleBone Black replaced Raspberry PI running networkgeekstuff.com (and performance reasons review)

For best article visual quality, open BeagleBone Black replaced Raspberry PI running networkgeekstuff.com (and performance reasons review) directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

With Raspberry PI, a very great microPC platform that started a trend of its own with two million RasberyPIs sold, a new market has emerged calling for microPC segment companies to compete. One of such alternative companies is BeagleBone and their very nice product is BeagleBone Black. So in this article, I would like to present the BeagleBone Black with some quick view on its abilities and because one BeagleBone Black has arrived to me a while ago, I can compare it with my older Raspberries. And most importantly, why the performance was so good that this web has moved to BeagleBone Black and abandoned Raspberries (while old Raspberries are now only as cold backup).

If you remember from my previous blogposts, RasberryPI is a platform on which actually this webserver is running during writing of this article (and you can read about building web server load-balanced on two RasberryPIs on in my previous tutorial articles). So I really found myself a useful work for my RaspberryPIs and I am from that point very Continue reading

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Complexity Concerns Temper SDN’s Promise According to Packet Design Survey

Perceived benefits propelling adoption but management issues worry service providers

MPLS/SDN 2013 International Conference, WASHINGTON, D.C. – Nov. 20, 2013 – Network service providers are buying into software defined networking (SDN) benefits but are troubled by the management challenges, according to a survey conducted by Packet Design yesterday. More than 100 organizations – nearly half comprised of service providers – weighed in on SDN adoption, business drivers, and concerns during the 16th annual MPLS/SDN International Conference in Washington, D.C.

Nearly All Examining or Deploying SDN

Almost 90 percent of organizations surveyed are exploring SDN in some way, with:

• 62 percent either researching or prototyping SDN;
• 19 percent with some production deployment;and another
• 8 percent planning to implement production SDN in either 2014 or 2015.

Only 11 percent said they have no current SDN plans.

Main Drivers Include New Services, Business Agility

Nearly half of survey respondents (43 percent) said the main business driver behind SDN in their organizations is supporting new services such as cloud, big data applications, and mobility. More than 26 percent consider increasing business agility (including responding faster to new network demands) the number one driver. Improving productivity (better network availability and performance for customers/users) Continue reading

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Data Edge Launches New Telecoms Performance Management Tool

Data Edge has launched a new telecoms performance management tool that it forecasts will bring in new revenues of €1.2m before the end of 2014. This includes a first contract just signed with a major telecommunications provider in Ireland worth €350,000. According to Data Edge, the management of network operations for telecommunications companies has become increasingly complicated. Constant network configuration changes, and the rollout and expansion of new services, have made complete network visibility extremely difficult. Data Edge therefore saw a gap in the market and teamed up with Packet Design to provide a solution for telecoms providers to improve network reporting, route visibility, analysis and diagnosis.

Data Edge has entered into an exclusive partnership with Packet Design to resell its product range in the Irish market. “To gain real insight into networks, engineers traditionally have had to query individual routers and manually correlate the resulting data, which is a tedious, error prone and time consuming process,” said Brian McBride, managing director, Data Edge. “SLA reporting, capacity planning, route visibility, fault finding, repairing and auditing are constant uphill struggles. Add cloud computing and virtualisation into the mix and these tasks become practically impossible. Operators told us they want a Continue reading

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The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

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Mass ESXi Deployment using Auto Deploy, Boot from SAN, and PowerShell

I recently had a need to deploy quite a few ESXi hosts on top of Cisco UCS B-Series blades (60+) back-ended by Netapp storage. I needed some kind of method to do this quickly so that I didn’t have to spend days just installing ESXi. Here were some of the design guidelines: Needed an ESXi 5.5 installation with the Cisco enic and fnic drivers installed, as well as the Cisco 1000v VEM module

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Mass ESXi Deployment using Auto Deploy, Boot from SAN, and PowerShell

I recently had a need to deploy quite a few ESXi hosts on top of Cisco UCS B-Series blades (60+) back-ended by Netapp storage. I needed some kind of method to do this quickly so that I didn’t have to spend days just installing ESXi. Here were some of the design guidelines: Needed an ESXi 5.5 installation with the Cisco enic and fnic drivers installed, as well as the Cisco 1000v VEM module

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Network Virtualization and the End-to-End Principle

[This post was written by Dinesh Dutt with help from Martin Casado.  Dinesh is Chief Scientist at Cumulus Networks. Before that, he was a Cisco Fellow, working on various data center technologies from ASICs to protocols to RFCs. He’s a primary co-author on the TRILL RFC and the VxLAN draft at the IETF.  Sudeep Goswami, Shrijeet Mukherjee, Teemu Koponen, Dmitri Kalintsev, and T. Sridhar provided useful feedback along the way.]

In light of the seismic shifts introduced by server and network virtualization, many questions pertaining to the role of end hosts and the networking subsystem have come to the fore. Of the many questions raised by network virtualization, a prominent one is this: what function does the physical network provide in network virtualization? This post considers this question through the lens of the end-to-end argument.

Networking and Modern Data Center Applications

There are a few primary lessons learnt from the large scale data centers run by companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. The first such lesson is that a physical network built on L3 with equal-cost multipathing (ECMP) is a good fit for the modern data center. These networks provide predictable latency, scale well, converge quickly when nodes or links change, and provide Continue reading

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Show 168 – Juniper QFX5100 & Virtual Chassis Fabric – Sponsored

Juniper Network’s Doug Hanks & Satish Surapaneni join Juniper customer (and Kool-Aid drinking fanboy) Kurt Bales in a discussion about the newly announced QFX5100 line of switches with Ethan Banks & Greg Ferro. Along the way, we talk about useful new technologies enabled by the QFX5100, such Virtual Chassis Fabric & TISSU. This is one of […]

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The post Show 168 – Juniper QFX5100 & Virtual Chassis Fabric – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

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Cashing in on Hotspot 2.0

Nothing is hotter right now in the networked world than Hotspot 2.0. While most of the attention on Hotspot 2.0 has centered on the technology and how it works, the really compelling “feature”(that has received nearly no attention) is the...

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‘Hello world’ for network engineers exploring Hadoop

It is hard to ignore all of the hype around Hadoop and Big Data these days. Like most infrastructure engineers, we tend to focus on how to build highly-available, highly-scalable networks – and I’m no exception. However, it is still important to me to keep up with and implement projects on popular trends, directly infrastructure […]

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The post ‘Hello world’ for network engineers exploring Hadoop appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by JR Mayberry.

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Stahp it with the Network programmer FUD already

Every week I see somebody ask “will all Network Engineers be programmers” on Twitter, LinkedIn, at a trade show or just to be antagonistic and for no other reason than to start an argument.

The anger inside has been brewing for over 12 months until the pressure valve finally released in the form of this blog post. Expect snark.

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Stahp it with the Network programmer FUD already

Every week I see somebody ask “will all Network Engineers be programmers” on Twitter, LinkedIn, at a trade show or just to be antagonistic and for no other reason than to start an argument.

The anger inside has been brewing for over 12 months until the pressure valve finally released in the form of this blog post. Expect snark.

What is a programmer anyway?

Lets clear something up. IF YOU CAN WRITE ONE LINE OF RUBY YOU ARE NOT A PROGRAMMER. The Programmers of myth and legend are these days referred to as “Software Engineers”, “Software Architects” and sometimes even “Hackers”, “Coders” or “Code Monkeys”. What they “do” - is build software for a living.

So what about Networking Engineers?

The networking industry can be broken in to four main segments:

Network Operations - These folk keep networks running. They eat support tickets and are seldom let out of their cages.

Network Architects - These folk run around data centers with whiteboards and sharpies and draw clouds. Consultants fall under this designation too. Occasionally these guys get their hands dirty and pick up a console cable but most times they are cooking up the most complicated solution to a simple Continue reading

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HP VAN SDN Controller – Download, Manuals and Forum Links

As things are sometime hard to find on HP.com, I thought I’d consolidate them here.

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HP VAN SDN Controller – Download, Manuals and Forum Links

As things are sometime hard to find on HP.com, I thought I’d consolidate them here.

HP VAN SDN Controller Download

HP VAN SDN Controller Manuals and Programmers Guide

HP SDN DevCenter

HP SDN Community Forum

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Stahp it with the Network programmer FUD already

Every week I see somebody ask “will all Network Engineers be programmers” on Twitter, LinkedIn, at a trade show or just to be antagonistic and for no other reason than to start an argument.

The anger inside has been brewing for over 12 months until the pressure valve finally released in the form of this blog post. Expect snark.

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HP VAN SDN Controller – Download, Manuals and Forum Links

As things are sometime hard to find on HP.com, I thought I’d consolidate them here.

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Healthy Paranoia Show 19: The ABCs of PCI DSS

Hello boys and girls! What time is it? That’s right, it’s time for another fun-filled episode of Healthy Paranoia! Joining us in the top secret Healthy Paranoia treehouse and just in time for the release of PCI DSS 3.0 is special guest, Dr. Anton Chuvakin, Research Director at Gartner and recognized security expert in the […]

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The post Healthy Paranoia Show 19: The ABCs of PCI DSS appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

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TPM chip protecting SSH keys

STOP! There is a better way. this post explains a simpler and more secure way.

Update 2: I have something I think will be better up my sleeve for using the TPM chip with SSH. Stay tuned. In the mean time, the below works.

Finally, I found out how to use a TPM chip to protect SSH keys. Thanks to Perry Lorier. I'm just going to note down those same steps, but with my notes.

I've written about hardware protecting crypto keys and increasing SSH security before:

• GPG and SSH with Yubikey NEO
• Benchmarking TPM backed SSL
• TPM backed SSL
• SSH certificates

but this is what I've always been after. With this solution the SSH key cannot be stolen. If someone uses this SSH key that means that the machine with the TPM chip is involved right now. Right now it's not turned off, or disconnected from the network.

Update: you need to delete /var/lib/opencryptoki/tpm/your-username/*.pem, because otherwise your keys will be migratable. I'm looking into how to either never generating these files, or making them unusable by having the TPM chip reject them. Update to come.

When I run this again on a completely blank system I'll add Continue reading