June, 2008

5 Sample BGP Configurations

Cisco’s documentation is some of the best for any IT product. With the fast pace that IT keeps for change and the complexity of the products that they make a hand has to be given to their technical writing department. To that end here is a link to five sample BGP configurations that anyone using BGP can find useful.

Load Sharing with BGP in Single and Multihomed Environments: Sample Configurations
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_configuration_example09186a00800945bf.shtml

File Storage for the Mobile User

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get to your files whether you were at home or work or while traveling.While we are at it wouldn’t it be nice if those files could be easily published to the Internet. And wouldn’t it be nice if those files were backed up and had multiple versions that you could use?

Well hopefully you won’t have to wait much longer. Drop Box is a company that will provider all of those features and more. On their home page you can see a demo of the product. From what I can tell their product will be cross-platform as well meaning Linux, Windows and Macc computers can share files over a secure connection.

The company currently has the product in beta but it surmised that they will start opening up the beta shortly.

Get Drop Boxwww.getdropbox.com

How to determine if you can run Vista

Windows Vista has been on the market for over a year now. Although the market share is reported to small it is undoubtedly going to grow. Many people have bad experiences with Vista’s hardware and driver compatibility not to mention not being able to run your favorite video games.

In order to help in the nebulous area of Vista compatibility Microsoft has released the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. It will allow you to view a report outlining if your current hardware and applications will run with Vista. It comes with a nice GUI and try’s to help you make best decision about which version of Vista you should get.

Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor
 Trackback URL

10 Dynamic DNS Services

If you have an Internet Service Provider that isn’t providing you with a static IP address for some reason then it can be a really hassle to continually find out your IP address. There are a variety of reasons why you might want to connect to your home or work place such as:

- Retriving files that are at home while you are at work
- Running a home based web or FTP site
- Various webcam or IP based security devices

There are services that will track your IP address and give you a nice name to refer to the IP address with. There is usually a client that you will need to install on your computer or server that will report that IP address of your home or work to the DDNS provider. The client usually small and very light weight. With the exception of a few companies the “no-frills” version is usually free.

Dynamic DNS Providers:

- DynDNS - http://www.dyndns.org
- No-IP - http://www.no-ip.com
- HN - http://www.hn.org
- ZoneEdit - http://www.zoneedit.com
- ChangeIP - http://www.changeip.com
- Yi - http://www.yi.org
- DHS - http://www.dhs.org
- DtDNS - http://www.dtdns.com
- DyNS - http://www.dyns.cx
- DNS2GO - Trackback URL

MS HyperV versus VMWare ESX

Microsoft’s HyperVisor software is new to the market. While it always takes time for a new product to have the bugs worked out it seems that Microsoft’s offering the visualization market is making waves even at this early stage. VMWare is surely aware of this and is going to working on proving that their product is superior in the coming months. Either way, competition in any market makes the product better for consumers.

Check out this article that discuss the various high level differences between VMWare and MS’s HyperVisor

http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisewindows/archives/2008/06/hyperv_gets_att.html?source=NLC-ENTWINDOW&cgd=2008-06-18

FireFox 3 Released

The newest shiniest version of FireFox has been unleashed on the world. The improvements to this new version of FireFox are supposed to be vast and for the most part they significant in most way. However, the average user likely wont notice most of them.

Official FireFox site:
 http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Exchangeless Coorporate Contacts

Life would be great if everyone used the same centralized mail server. While Exchange is an option for most it is not an option for all. Here is a great post by someone who has a few alternatives if Microsoft or Exchange aren’t your thing.

http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/01/28/centralized-contacts-and-corporate-calendar-without-exchange/

OpenSource Virtualization on Linux

VirtualBox is one of the best virtualization products that I have seen for a desktop user. It runs well and it makes life easier if you need to run applications on a PC but use Linux as your primary OS.

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Emulators/VirtualBox-23194.shtml

Sample HP Procurve Configuration

So everyone probably knows how to setup a switch. You plug them in and away they go right. Wellll, that is mostly true. While they will work if you use them that way you won’t really get the value out of a higher-end switch if you do do that.

In this post I run through the basics of configuring an HP Procurve switch. While a lot of this information can be carried over to other platforms such as Cisco the commands will be different for most of the entries.

This is the name of the swtich. You are going to want to set this value even if it is a simple name since it will help immesenely when trying to figure out which switch it is exactly.
hostname “net-2610″

By default most HP switches have a low threshold for the number of VLAN’s that they can support. Entering in this command will allow you to break that maximum most of the time.
max-vlans 256

This one will let you set the timezone
time timezone -360

This one sets the daylight savings time information
time daylight-time-rule User-defined begin-date 3/11 end-date 11/4

If you want to be able to manage your switches from other subnets or if you want them to pick up their time from the Internet you will need the switch to have a gateway.
ip default-gateway 192.168.1.1

Set the IP of the time server
sntp server 192.168.1.10

Set the protocol for time synchronization
timesync sntp

Set the method of synchronization
sntp unicast

VLAN 1 is in the configuration by default so you don’t have to add this line
vlan 1

Default lines as well
name “DEFAULT_VLAN”
untagged 1-44,46-52

IP address of the VLAN. This IP is the one that you will be using when managing the switch remotely.
ip address 192.168.5.53 255.255.255.0

Default command that lets you exit this section
exit

This entry isn’t a default but I like to move the various devices off of VLAN 1 and into their VLAN if possible
vlan 10

Name the VLAN so you know why you created it.
name “Data”

Default command here
exit

If you are running a PoE switch I find that I usually need to run this command since a lot of devinces are running on a standard that is pre-standard for PoE.
power pre-std-detect

The next few lines turn on spanning-tree which you definitely want to use.
spanning-tree
spanning-tree legacy-path-cost
spanning-tree priority 2 force-version STP-compatible

These next two lines let you know that you will need a password for managing the device.
password manager
password operator

Links:
If you want more information on setting the time for an HP Procurve device check out my previous post here

Windows 7 Preview Interview

Interesting interview of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. While it is not the original video there are some good parts if you have the time to read it.

http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080527/gates_ballmer/