Had a nice piece of homework cut out with getting site-to-site ipsec working between a relatives Netgear and my Cisco 877. UniverCD once again provided to be crucial in my understanding and working out what should go where. Thanks to Ilya for reminding me to browse that site rather than just search it.

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Categories: Networking
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Yet another non CCIE post 😉

It appears that Debian Lenny by default only binds to 127.0.0.1 (localhost). I had to add the following two lines to snmpd.conf to get snmpd to listen to external requests.

interface eth0
agentaddress 217.195.248.251:161

I eventually found the solution at debianhelp.org.

Categories: Main blog, Networking
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*Sigh* Took me an hour or two to figure this one out. Cacti now does a ping before actually polling a device for stats. I’m running a small cacti site which had been neglected for a long time. After updating cacti and cleaning up some mess I was confused why one router did get polled and the other’s graphs remained a dumb “nan”.

I debugged and pinged, even installed hping3 to do UDP pings. I don’t want to run cacti as root, especially not on a vhost. So the UDP ping had to work. The pings arrived but still no replies.

Getting sidetracked I noticed that the one router that did work was being hit by SSH login attempts and it’s cpu was spiking. An ACL took care of the break-in attempts but then I noticed that directed broadcasts were made to my server’s segment. So I nailed that down plus proxy-arps when I noticed that the router which had worked before now was causing errors in Cacti as well.

Tracking back I noticed that the UDP ping ‘replies’ were unreachables rather than ICMP replies (doh, how obvious!) . I enabled IP unreachables on both routers again and I was done. It’s amazing how blind one can be at times to the blatantly obvious…

Categories: Main blog, Networking, Work
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Only just noticed but in effect since September 7th. The CCIE lab exam has gone up from $1250 to $1400, which results in $1694,- / €1199,30 including the 21% VAT for the Brussels lab location.

Even though it’s a 12% price increase it’s been 8 years since the previous increase. It’s been argued on Groupstudy that a 2% annual increase is not bad as it’s relatively on par with the inflation we’ve seen over the last 8 years. Never the less for those of us forced to pay for our own labs it’s a bitter pill to take.

Also note that all exams from CCNA to the CCIE written and lab have increased in price.

Categories: CCIE R&S, Main blog
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I’m normally quite weary of sites tracking my behaviour and have NoScript installed on FireFox myself to control this. It’s amazing to see how much crap NoScript blocks.

Well, I kinda joined the evil camp by installing HitTail. In my defence, HitTail only looks at how people come to my site. It does not track users (to my knowledge that is). More specifically it tells me what search strings resulted in hits on my site.

I’ve come up with the idea that I’ll use these hits to delve deeper into stuff. I’m quite impressed by some other sites which go into intricate detail of current hot topics, be it training subjects or market hyped topics. My main priority will remain my certification. But looking beyond my 1st CCIE, I’m not sure what the future will bring. Could be another CCIE track or VoIP related, maybe even PRINCE2 or even something Juniper. Only time will tell.

However I really like the idea of addressing hot items. I realise that most google (etc) hits on my site will be related to the current content of my site. Guess I’ll have to involve the things I’m working on at work. But I’m open to suggestions, so if you have requests or suggestions for (finding) good topics then by all means leave a comment!

Categories: Main blog
2 Comments »

A recent question prompted this post. I’ve noticed that my site is getting more popular, despite my silence over the past weeks. I hope to propperly break the silence soon. All I can say now is that I’m busy working out an action plan towards my next lab attempt. By no means am I giving up!

Since my last post I’ve been very busy with work related issues and as such have not had the time or the right frame of mind to study. Please bear with me as I work to get back into the game. Feel free to comment on my previous posts, or this one if you like. It really helps me to know that other find this stuff useful.

Categories: CCIE R&S, Main blog, Work
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