When I had already dived into RADIUS for wireless network authentication, authorization (and accounting) – AAA – I started to think that it was worth to tinker about moving admin authentication of @work switches to RADIUS too. Netgear managed switches definitely support this – unfortunately neither their Websites, KB, nor the (mostly quite good) Software … more
At my job we have been introducing new switches and in terms of feature’s and cost we’ve gone with Netgear. Sure every vendor does have it’s sharp edges, but so far mostly I’ve been quite happy with them. I’ve been thinkering around with how to monitor them – since they do SNMP I studied their … more
It’s been a bit of time since I’ve had to deploy a new iSCSI target at work, this time it was a QNAP box that will serve as secondary backup target for some Backup Exec. As you have hopefully read elsewhere if using iSCSI, be it over 1GE or 10GE: Use Jumbo or Giant frames … more
As said in the previous post, the “fancy” EXSYS 8 port card got happily recognized, but: It only showed 4 of the total of 8 Ports, and that was only when the 2 onboard serial controllers were disabled. *grrr* After trying out also Debian’s backport kernel without success I checked the 8250’s driver code in … more
I recently ran across an interesting issue when I started building a network lab. Anyway, I wanted a serial console server to not always swap console cables between every box. Since real serial console servers (well, makes me think of a KVM switch but for serial console ports) can be prhibitively priced, I looked at … more
Hmm, I don’t know why forgot to post this, I just wasn’t caring that much about my blog recently š I’ve been at the libre software meeting – for the french speaking people “rĆ©union mondiale du logiciel libre” – in Geneva this year. I initially planned to only speak a little about illumos, then later … more
Correct time in VMs is unfortunately has and will continue to be somewhat of an issue – some virtualization environments provide clock sources so you don’t haveĀ to rely on ntpd (which fails if the drift gets too high). So for the short note – how can you check if you are using a time … more
I’ve been a irregular user and admin of a GLPI server at work – GLPI is an open source IT asset management software that enables you to automate lots of asset management workĀ (also thanks to FusionInventory and its agents) while providing a UI that also non-Admins can work with – e.g. make your financial auditor. … more
This is a story about good practise and “don’ts” in sysadmin work,Ā inspired by Bryan’s (@bdha) blog entry about theĀ first law of systems administration. Recently IĀ got some used gear for labĀ – the story of this gear, a set of FC switches – remembered me of a lesson about what can go wrong … more
Here is a experimental branch of the mainline kernel with some backported patches that will be coming from stagin-next, hid and the network area where some of the drivers Hyper-V have left staging as of December 2011. So with the release of 3.2 sooner or later, you can fetch a kernel that has: SCSI hot … more