I decided to start blogging again, assuming I can come up with something interesting to say. Back to using WordPress for the moment, along with MarsEdit and TextMate.
About Packetslave Industries
I am a Senior Network Engineer for a large global IT consulting company. I completed my CCIE Routing & Switching certification (#23115) in January 2009 and am currently working on CCIE Security. From time to time, I manage to sleep.more →Delicious Bookmarks
- How to: Upgrade to vSphere 4.1
Step-by-step process for upgrading. A huge caveat is that vCenter 4.1 requires a 64-bit OS and thus a DB migration. - Nexus 7000 Training Documentation
Some terrific (3rd party) introduction documents to the Nexus 7000 platform. - Enable ICMP (Ping) with the Server 2008 Firewall
Quite annoying that Win 2008 doesn't allow ICMP by default. Here's how to turn it back on so monitoring works properly. - Converting lvm to a normal partition
There's no easy way to do it, but here's a less-easy one. Need to do this to many machines, since mbralign doesn't support LVM. - GNU Parallel
Shell tool for running a job on multiple lines of input in parallel, either locally or on remote machines. - 6 Command Line Tools for Linux Performance Monitoring
Some interesting tools I hadn't heard of, in the same vein as 'top' but with more features. - OSPF Fast Convergence | CCIE Blog
Really, really in-depth discussion of tuning OSPF to minimize convergence/failover time. - VMware Snapshots 101
How VMDKs and snapshots actually work at a low level, along with some best practices. - Understanding TCP Sequence and Acknowledgment Numbers
Terrific use of Wireshark to deep-dive into the individual packets of a TCP session to see how the flow works. - VLAN Security White Paper - Cisco Systems
Covers most of the common ways to attack/exploit VLANs, along with how to protect against them (when possible) - Mac Configuration Management at Los Alamos National Laboratory (PDF)
Puppet is more-and-more becoming the Mac bulk administration tool of choice. Google uses it too. - Practical, Visual, Three-Dimensional Pedagogy for Internet Protocol Packet Header Control Fields
A long-winded way of saying "building the TCP and IP packet headers using Lego. Awesome - Tradeoffs between scalability and performance in UCS
One Cisco UCS system can scale to between 80 and 122 blades, depending on uplink oversubscription. - How to Get Catalyst Switch Backplane Utilization Using SNMP
Aggregate bandwidth across all modules. Doesn't seem to be possible on the 4500, unfortunately. - Port forwarding a range of ports on Cisco IOS
Using an ACL with a one-IP address pool to automatically forward multiple ports.