Techinvasion.net » Events

New mailing List

john — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:44:15 +0000

I started a new mailing list. this list is for anyone to ask questions about networking design and implimentation. We can help with configuration questions of all gear Juniper, cisco, hp, fortinet…..

Also questions reguarding Linux, Solaris and BSD are welcome as well

http://lists.techinvasion.net

Public DMVPN network.

john — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:10:04 +0000

I was thinking about a new project idea. I was thinking of setting up a dynamic multipoint VPN concentrator. Put a small LAN behind it with a couple of servers. Put the configuration instructions on a webpage for Juniper and Cisco devices. I was thinking to run BGP routing protocol over the interface as it scales reasonably well.

The important part here is I wanted to create a web form which requests the internal and external address ranges of anyones network. Once that person submits that information I will have a Peal script pull those messages from the web form, parse the information, insert the networks and IP addresses into a J-Script template and apply it to my Juniper SRX router automatically.

This project will enable Cisco and Juniper students to participate in the environment and create a public VPN network where p2p APPS and anything else can run over the network without having to worry about any prying eyes. I want to see how far this project will scale. I was even envisioning a time when other people with idle equipment can volunteer to become a secondary hub to take some of the load once my connection reaches 10 thousand or so tunnels. Because of the way DMVPN works. The tunnels between sites will open up as needed when a user from site A needs to talk to site B. This combined with using BGP as the routing protocol will mean that it will require very little bandwidth as traffic destined from site A to C will not transit site B if site B in this scenario is the hub.

Anyways if anyone out there is interested please leave a comment.

Send me questions and feedback!

john — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:57:31 +0000

I see a lot of you out there find this site through various search engines and many of you are searching for information on gre tunnels. I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the traffic and I want to let everyone know that creating an account is free and I would love to hear your feedback on articles and any questions you might have.

New TechCast Posted

john — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 06:51:42 +0000

I have been busy lately, I am in the middle of a Data Center migration at work, which is eating up hours of my personal time, and I have a million other projects on the burner. I have fresh content coming but in the mean time, I did a TechCast on Junos, please view the video at http://www.exiletv.com.

Until Next time

New Forums

john — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:33:19 +0000

We have added a new forums section to techinvasion.net. We hope these forums will become a big part of the site and allow all the users to participate, ask questions, and get answers. The link to the forums is along the left hand side of the page in the categories section. You can also go directly to the forums by going to http://www.techinvasion.net/forum.

We are also looking for writers to post relevant articles such as the ones that have been posted by our 3 writers so far. If you are interested in writing for techinvasion.net please send an email to admin@techinvasion.net.

MIT student arrested for fake bomb

john — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:20:18 +0000

An MIT student was arrested in Logan intl Airport for wearing a sweatshirt with a prototyping board on it and a 9 volt battery which lit up some led’s that said MIT course VI which is the numerical designation for computer and electrical engineering majors. The shirt which she has and has been wearing for a long time, was something that a class of students made as a project. The police surrounded her in the airport with automatic weapons and arrested her, then commented that she was lucky to be alive. As you can see from the link to the article below anyone who has half a brain can see that it is a piece of techno art. However I just wanted to post this to solicit your opinions about the fear of electronics in this country and the sad state of affairs. This is even worse considering that MIT is known for its research in embedded computers in clothing and the airport is right around the corner from MIT! Also she walked up to the airline desk and asked when a flight was coming in because she was picking up a friend. She did not even try to get through the security checkpoint.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html

Call of Duty 4

john — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:21:23 +0000

Open Solaris 10 sandbox

john — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 02:54:50 +0000

Thanks to those friendly people from Digg.com who decided it would be fun to bring my Solaris box to its knees by forking and other things to DDOS my Solaris zone. I have learned many ways of enhancing the security of Solaris zones. I have limited the Sandbox zone to 1% of total CPU usage. I have limited the total number of processes to 1000 and I have installed the Solaris Jass security hardening script. I plan to post many of my discoveries in the future. Work has been busy lately and it is on the burner of things to be done along with part 2 of solaris zones.

First Production ZFS server today

john — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 02:43:15 +0000

I have plenty of small business clients and sooner or later they all face one big challenge. They all outgrow the initial 80GB tape drives that we put on their servers. The problem is that most of these are small businesses and most of them could just afford the initial network, and asking them to pony up $2000+ for a new tape drive or worse yet autoloader is out of the question.

Until recently we would try to switch them from full daily backups to full on Mondays and incremental the rest of the week. The problem with this is that this really only works up until about 120GB. After that you are looking at more than 2 tapes. If someone has to switch tapes on a Monday while users are changing files, it is very hard to get a consistent backup. This problem got me thinking, what is a relatively cheap way to get consistent backups of the server, retain more copies of the backups with less pace consumed, and be able to backup to more then two tapes without having backups run on data users are interacting with, which could stress the system, hurt performance, and cause inconsistent backups.

My solution was to purchase a low-end server like an HP ML-110. Put 2 500GB sata drives in the system, and 2 40GB drives with hardware raid 1 for the system OS files. I then installed Solaris 10 and made a ZFS pool with the two 500GB drives mirrored. I shared the ZFS pool with NFS and Samba (NFS for Unix and samba for windows 2003 servers). I have the servers do a full backup to the ZFS pool on Monday, which is about 200GB. The incremental backups the rest of the week is about 50GB total. I set the backups to overwrite the data each week, so as not to use up too much disk space. This brings full weeks backups to about 220GB with compression on the ZFS pool. I then take a snapshot of the entire pool on Saturday and keep that snapshot for 4 weeks. This means that even though I am overwriting the backup files each week. The snapshots only take up as much space as the differences, so for about 380GB of disk space I have 1TB worth of backups on this Solaris box. And it gets even better. I set the tape drive to backup from the Solaris box every day after the other servers dump their backups to it the previous night. Since the data is not live data the backups are consistent and also the backups can be done during the day so someone can insert tape after tape while people are in the building.

This is how ZFS has made life easier for me at one client site. This solution is scalable and priced at one-third the cost of a 400GB auto-loading tape drive. If this solution works out over the next couple of months I fully intend to make this my primary solution for those clients that can’t afford bigger tape drives.

TV Networks Just Don’t Get it

john — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 01:11:52 +0000

I t seems to me that the big four tv network either don’t understand what people want or simply don’t care. If you look at the cable networks you have stimulating things to watch like Nip Tuck, Dexter, Sleeper Cell, Battlestar Galactica, Monk, and too many other good dramas to mention. However when you turn to the major networks they simply show one copied worn out reality show after another.

Until recently I assumed they just didn’t get it, but then I found out that it cost the networks on average 4 to 8 times as much money to produce a script based show. Kind of makes you think doesn’t it?