In the past few months we have seen major outages from United Airlines, the NYSE, and the Wall Street Journal. With almost 5,000 flights grounded, and NYSE halting trading the cost of failure is high. When bad things happen IT personal everywhere look at increasing fault tolerance by adding redundancy mechanisms or protocols to increase […]
Network Design — Keeping it simple
Since the dawn of time people have skirted best practice and banged together networks, putting the proverbial square peg in the esoteric round hole. For example, new vendor XYZ’s solution has brought in new requirements for deployment. While it may seem easier for to throw together a new firewall, a switch, and maybe some additional […]
Vendor PSA: Words and Phrases to Avoid in Presentations
Over the years IT professionals have sat through countless presentations, conference calls, and keynotes. We’ve been preached too, explained “the problem”, and forced to bear witness to the the future. During such events all of us have had to step up and explain that we already understand the problem, we know who your company is, […]
Fixing iMessage on Hackintosh
Mid December 2012 Apple shut down the Messages Beta for Lion, soon after many hackintosh users started noticing issues with signing into iMessage. At some point in time, people far smarter than me managed to patch a little used bootloader called Clover to allow us to log into iMessage, but Clover is young and still […]
Double NAT – Cisco ASA 8.4+
Recently I was faced with an issue outside my normal expertise… those of you that know me realize I am anything but a security engineer. But in reality, you must always expand your horizons. One of the projects I’m working on involves migrating between two edge networks. Obviously, for a time there has to be […]
Vim Primer for Network Engineers
Vi is arguably the best text editing software in the world. There, I said it… deal with it! It should be noted that while many people continue to refer to Vi simply as such, Vim (Vi improved) has been the standard since around 1998. Vi? Old and busted. Vim? New hotness. Vi isn’t an editor […]
Another Wicked Vim Tip
As a follow up to my blog post covering Vim on the PacketPushers blog, I wanted to share with you another time saving tip for getting our jobs done not only quickly, but helping to remove one of the tedious steps in firewall maintenance. Today, I needed to add a large chunk of ACEs to […]
My Toolbag
Following the current popular topic of “Whats in your toolbag?” ala Stretch and Fryguy. I’ve decided (after some persuading) to detail the contents of my own bag. Without further blathering, here we go.. First, the bag itself. A simple open top bag from Sears (I believe its no longer sold). I love open top bags […]
