Continue reading »]]> You might just have noticed over the last couple of weeks, this Website has undergone a bit of a transformation.

One of the extra abilities that some of this work has given me is the ability to gain a little insight in to the people that visit my blog.  While perusing the statistics today one particular entry caught my eye.

Extract from my Website Logs

Somewhere, Someone is using a very VERY old version of Windows still!

Microsoft have not been supporting or producing any Security updates to Windows Millenium since July 11th 2006, meaning that for nearly five years now, that individual has been receiving no patches or updates of any kind.  I would suspect that any Anti-Virus software (if any!) that they may be running is long past it’s end of life now, and is very likely to be out of date at best.   Internet Explorer 6 is probably the newest version of IE that Windows ME could run, and the more observant amongst you have probably already noticed that the PC in question is already infected with the Zango Toolbar spyware!

I guess it just reinforces for me my belief that it is vital to stay current with your Software Updates and Patches.  I know there will always be a healthy dose of pragmatism involved on the spend/save upgrade cycle, but in my mind that really is pushing the limits in my mind.  It is little wonder that we are subject to such massive disruption and organised anarchy caused by “Hackers” (used in the negative context) using things like the Storm Botnet, which to an extent relies on un-patched vulnerabilities in Windows to spread.

So the message of the day today – Keep your PC Up to date.  When was the last time you ran WindowsUpdate?

Incidentally, I’ve added a small section to this blog with some recommended tools and utilities, including a Free Anti-Virus recommendation, and some Security Tools to help keep your PC safe.

Continue reading »]]> Long time followers may be aware that I’m lucky enough to be part of a test programme run by a certain large PC & Printer manufacturer. On two previous occasions I’ve been sent an all-in-one Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax to “test” and report back on, at the end of which time I’m allowed to keep the printer as a Thank you for my feedback and participation.

I finished the second of these test programmes in about August last year, and have happily been printing away on this “free” printer ever since. Admittedly not making particularly heavy use of this one, it’s still got it’s original ink cartridges fitted!

I came to use it a few weeks ago and discovered that the printer just had no power whatsoever. Having checked the obvious cables, and extension leads I concluded that it was a printer fault of some sort, and started cursing as I expected that meant I’d need to go out and buy a new printer.

Surprisingly, I made a few inquiries first, and after one phone call, much to my delight a new power supply is on it’s way to me. I have “full” support on the printer until September this year!

For a printer that cost me nothing but a little time, I think that’s pretty fantastic service!

Continue reading »]]> Prompted by some fellow Networksy types, (Jeff and Jeremy), who’s recent entries on the contents of their toolbags I found extremely interesting;  I thought I’d go through mine as I have a few unusual items!

Starting with the fairly standard stuff:

Wire Strippers

Good old fashioned and simple wire strippers.  These ones have an adjustable lock to stop you stripping too much cable unintentionally.

RJ45 Crimping Tool

Then of course the RJ45 Crimps.  Nothing too fancy, just cheap and practical.  I have never needed to crimp an RJ-11, so all I need are RJ-45 ones.

RJ45-DB9 and RJ45-DB25 Console Cables

A standard set of Cisco Console cables;  I tend to have a couple of brand new ones as well as tried and tested ones in the box, as I often end up leaving them behind attached to “core” devices, so there’s at least one on any site that we touch.

A Krone Tool, or Punchdown Tool

A good old Krone punchdown tool.  My old and trusty one is starting to be a bit tempramental now when it comes to cutting the wires, so I’ve recently added a new one which has yet to be christened.  Fortunately I don’t need these THAT often!

Cage Nut Tools

The quite rare and exceedingly valuable lesser spotted Cage-Nut Tool. I try to keep hold of these as they have a tendancy to vanish from my toolbox when other engineers realise what they are and how useful they can be! Most decent brands of Rack seem to come with one, so I’m not sure quite how they are so rare. Maybe they live under datacentre floors along with the cage nut eating mice?

Cage Nuts and Velcro Ties

Some Cage Nuts/Bolts, and some Velcro ties, have to try and keep things nice and neat now!

Multi Tool

This one is a relatively new2 addition, a freebie I picked up at Infosec this year, but it replaces a rather worn and similar one.

RJ45/Cat5e Couplers

I usually keep a handful of these Couplers at the ready.  I’ve used them for all sorts of strange purposes over the years.  Everything from extending Cisco Console Cables for those REALLY hard to reach devices, to temporarily connecting cables in lieu of an IP Phone with a built-in Switch.

Anti Static Wrist Strap

I probably don’t need to explain why these are here, but it’s a good “just in case”.

Baby Cat5e Cables

Always a good standby, but I keep some of these 6″ Cat5e cables, they seem to come in handy all over the place!

A collection of Serial Adapters, Converters and Loops

A mixture of Adapters, Gender Benders, Modem Eliminators, RJ45-RS232 adapters, and Loop Tools.

Now on to the slightly more interesting stuff!

Not sure what this is called!

I’m not sure what this is called; I managed to pick this up several years ago when doing a project involving opening and unboxing over 1200 new IP Phones which were boxed in boxes of 4.  The sheer quantity of cardboard and the number of boxes to be opened quickly caused fingers to be cut to shreds and fingernails to be damaged, but this really made life so much easier.

USB Memory Stick

I’m always equipped with a USB Memory Stick, simply because my lanyard with my Swipe Card on it has one built in.  This was a Promotional item from a supplier a couple of years ago, and has 1Gb storage, which is plenty for most things I’m likely to need.

Tone Generator and Probe

This one is so valuable when trying to trace cables and find those frustratingly misnumbered !  I stick with this slightly older model because it has both an RJ45 connection, and a set of Croc-Clips for wiring only checks.

A Butt

Not sure if I’ve spelt that one correctly!   The Butt is becoming less useful these days in the “modern” world of IP Telephony, but it’s still useful to have for tracing Wires and Analogue lines.

My current Cable Tester

A fairly standard Cat5 cable tester.  I haven’t had cause to use the older BNC style cable tester for some time, but this one is a two-part unit for testing local cables or entire cable runs, and will identify Straight Through or Crossover cables.

Short Wave Radio's

I added these some years ago after myself and a colleague were working in a building, one of us in the Patch Panel / Comms Room, and another person at the other end of a cable run.  I actually have a set of four but keep two in my Toolbox and two at home.

Star Drive

An all-in-one unit for most sizes of star type screw, this one is a really useful one to keep handy.

Digital Multimeter

Again an all-purpose tool which has a multiplicity of uses!  I tend to use the conductivity test and Voltage readings most of the time, but it has saved me from a nasty shock on at least one occasion!

Cable Snake Head

This one is in the spirit of keeping things tidy!  I sometimes have cause to use the plastic surround which wraps a bundle of cables in a protective sheath.  This is the special head which is used to apply the covering.  It opens up and is clipped around the cables to be protected, and the sheath slides over the protruding knob.  You then slide the head along the cable while pushing the protective sheath on to the head and hey presto, the cable is all nice and neat and protected.

MiFi and USB Extension Cable

The MiFi is used to get me Internet connectivity in places where corporate network connections are not available, or too slow.  You never know when you’re going to need to download a different IOS image, and if the Network is broken – well you simply have to have an alternative.  It’s often also faster than Hotel Wifi as I can get up to 8Mb all to myself on this, depending on how good the 3G coverage is at the time.   The USB extension cable is used to get to those really hard to reach USB ports from time to time.

Head Light!

Interestingly I note some of my peers keep a Flashlight in their tools;  this is my equivalent.  With an elasticated head fitting, it can go over my head to give me hands free illumination while working.

Cable Clips

I’m not sure where I picked these up, or what their proper purchase is, but they are ideal for temporarily holding some cables “up” together in the back of a rack somewhere.  The metal clips will hook on to all sorts of things, and the Velcro at the bottom keeps the cables secure.

CompactFlash Adapter

Used for connecting directly to the Laptop and transferring stuff straight to/from a CF card before putting it in a Router or Switch.

Special Tool to Factory Reset a certain type of UTM Appliance

This is a specific tool for a certain brand of UTM appliance.  It’s credit card sized but fairly thick with a push-out USB cable head.  Plugging it in to the USB port on an appliance will cause the appliance to reset to it’s factory default, so the ultimate in password reset tools I guess!

Miscellaneous Widgets

And lastly a collection of Miscellaneous Widgets including some Permanent Marker Pens, a collection of Batteries, a standard USB Memory Stick, a Wireless USB Network Adapter, and a GLC-T GBIC.

That’s all.  I’ve not shown the “boring” screwdrivers, or must have label printer etc which are probably an ever present feature of most Network Guys’ toolkits.  My only problem at the moment is that I don’t have a proper “box” to put all the tools in;  I’d like one similar to this Stanley one, but currently this is all in a plastic crate at work which will slide in to the back of the car nice and easily if needed.

So, what’s in your Toolkit?

Continue reading »]]> … nay, I NEED one!

What am I on about you may ask?

The answer is simple….  one of these:

It’s an LG N2B1DD2 2 Bay Blu-ray Network Attached Storage 2TB which connects to the Network and provides Network Attached Disk for me to back up and archive data to.

I’ve had a 1Tb Buffalo Terastation for about five years now, and it’s choc-full of data, with my MP3 Collection, my Library of Audiobooks, copies of most of my Applications and so forth, and that’s BEFORE I count the Multi-Gigabyte’s of Documentation I’ve accumulated from all the different PC’s I look after, and various Laptops that “visit” for me to maintain!

The Buffalo was a 1Tb, the new one is 2Tb but has the added benefit of allowing me to migrate on-line storage to near-line or off line using the built-in Blu-Ray recorder, which is REALLY interesting!

The fact that it’ll work as a DLNA Server, so I could stream Video straight from the storage device to my Whizzy Samsung 7-Series TV is a huge bonus, and the iTunes Server thing is quite interesting too.

So, this is squarely on my list of gadgets to acquire.  Psst;  Anyone want to buy a 2nd hand Buffalo Terastation?? 

Continue reading »]]> Here’s hoping this vision becomes a reality, but I think there’s actually a fair chance on this one!

I found this article today about a Wearable Flexible OLED screen that has been developed by an American company.

Now my imagination combined that with the functionality and power of the fantastic Apple iPhone 3G which I’ve been a very happy user of for a month or so now.

Imagine the sheer power of a fairly thin and flexible band around your wrist that encompassed the functionality of your Watch, your Phone, your PDA, and gave you Mobile Internet etc too?    It sounds very Scifi, but looks like it might just be entering the realms of possiblity now!

What more can I say, apart from “I WANT ONE?”!

Continue reading »]]> Good old Ivan Pepelnjak has collated an MPLS Cheet Sheet over on the IOS Hints & Tricks Blog, which may well come in very handy!

Or go straight for the PDF Download here: http://wiki.nil.com/wk/images/b/b1/MPLS_VPN_cheatsheet.pdf

I could think of one or two engineers at a certain large Telco that might find that quite handy…

Continue reading »]]> … how to create a “Free” TFTP Server under Windows 2000. (Haven’t tested this under Windows 2003 Server yet)

Using a fairly standard Windows 2000 install (tested under server, not sure about workstation)

Copy “tftpd.exe” from “c:\winnt\system32\dllcache\tftpd.exe” to “c:\winnt\system32\tftpd.exe”

Get a copy of “sc.exe” from the c:\windows\system32 folder on any windows xp box and place it in “c:\winnt\system32″

Open a command window and type “sc create tftpd binpath= c:\winnt\system32\tftpd.exe ”

The service “tftpd” is now available in the service control panel. Either Open the control panel, find the service, and start it. (If you want it to start automatically, you can set it to do so from the control panel.) or type “net start tftpd”

Open the registry to the following key. \\hkey_local_machine\system\currentControlSet\services\tftpd. Add a subkey “parameters” to the tftpd folder. Add a string value “Directory” to the “parameters” key. Give “Directory” the path location where your boot image file is located. (example c:\tftpd).

Remember to stop/start the tftpd service to persuade it to create the necessary registry keys.

Continue reading »]]> I’m a fairly big MSN Windows Live Messenger user, but I’m starting to think that might change fairly soon.

I started to experience some annoyances with the current 8.5 version of WLM.  It started to “jump” to focus, if I was merrily doing something in another application like Word, Excel, or even Notepad, and someone sent me a message it’d pop up and change the input focus to the chat bar, so if I was (as I regularly tend to do) typing away without looking at the screen to see what was going on, I could mistakenly send whoever spoke to me some totally irellevant and boring drivel!

So, I tried upgrading to the beta of Version 9, in the hope that particular problem would be fixed, and sure enough it does seem to have gone away, only now WLM itself seems to be exceedingly flaky.

Quite regularly I can be on line and in mid-conversation with someone when my messages start to bounce back as undelivered.   Sometimes WLM decides to e-mail them to my recipient rather than using the Chat window.  For no apparent reason the chat service will sign out and refuse to sign in again, and according to the “Service Status” pages there’s no problem, and everything is running normally.

Anyway, I decided to uninstall the Beta of WLM 9, and go back to 8.5 which was reliable for the most part even if it was damned annoying, only to find that the bouncing messages and e-mailed chats aren’t limited to v9, it’s going on with v8.5 as well.

I assume it’s because MS are preparing the back-end for the rollout of v9, but I hope to god they get it all sorted out soon, It’s driving me mad!!

Continue reading »]]>

Yes, you read it correctly!That’s one of many clever tag lines used by Splunk’s Marketers!  And it’s not half as clever by far as the Application!

It’s another free product!  Amazingly, the basic version of Splunk is gratis!  and can be downloaded from www.splunk.com

It’s at it’s most basic level a log crunching tool, but it can do so very much more!  It’s one of those concepts that seems really simple, but the mind boggles at the complexity behind it.

I’ve been in a situation where I’ve had to wade through hundreds of Mb’s of SYSLOG’s grepping (looking!) for a particular IP address or two, and thought to myself “there has to be an easier way than this!”  and there is!

I’ll have to explain a little about what I did to make it work, but after no more than half a day’s tinkering, I was up and running with an amazingly powerful tool.  And the half day included messing about setting up VMWare ESXi Server and a Virtual Machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to host it on!

Anyway, I had to do a bit of messing about from the base RHEL5 Webserver build to get it up and running, including tweaks to SELinux for the Security (yes, I ended up turning it OFF!) and installing a few PERL packages that I needed for some of the plugins, and installing the SYSLOG-NG package so I could do some clever filtering (More on that another time!)

Anyway, I set up SYSLOG-NG to filter different types of device identified by IP Address to different SYSLOG files.   I identified 2-3 specific categories of device that I wanted to filter;

• Cisco PIX Firewalls
• Nokia IP Security Appliances
• Windows Boxes (using the SNARE Agent to convert Windows Event Logs to SYSLOG!)
• Cisco Routers & Switches

I started with these for reasons that should become apparent as I explain further.

I then used good old “mkfifo” to create fifo handles for these Syslogs.

Then having installed Splunk, which was as simple as downloading and installing the RPM, and tweaking the RC files to ensure SYSLOG-NG and Splunk started automagically, I was in business.

Connecting to the server using a Web Browser on Port 8000, and added each of my FIFO’s as an Input Source and I was ready to go!  Splunk has a number of free packages that you can install that can influence it’s understanding of various different types of log, (this is why I separated the types of log to different pipes), so by appying these filters to the different input sources from SYSLOG meant that Splunk understood much more about the data it was actually receiving.

Then I simply swapped the Splunk Box for the IP Address of a UNIX box that sits there gathering SYSLOG’s all day, rather than revisit hundreds of Network Devices and tell them to send their SYSLOG’s somewhere else!

Bearing in mind you can send it just about any sort of textual log file, and can use Netcat, Nessus Scans, even TCP Dumps, or LEA Exports from your Checkpoint Firewalls (more on that in another post!), and the data actually starts to accumulate and flow.

This is where the sheer power of Splunk comes in to it’s own.  The best thing I can really do is point you at one of the Live Demo’s so you can play for yourself… so here:

• Splunk & Network Security

Anyway, one day, a little tinkering and one “Enterprise Evaluation License” later, I’m wanting to reach for the proverbial Cheque book and buy licenses!  My colleagues have actually been using the tool to troubleshoot and fix real live problems on the Network, and they all love it too.

The three problems I have right now tho are that:

1. It’s installed on a Virtual Machine, so the CPU and Disk Use are a concern!
2. The Free Enterprise Eval License won’t allow me to index more than 5Gb of logs in a day
3. I want it NOW NOW NOW!