Type-2 interconnects are fun, but mtu issues are not. When faced with migrating subnets  from one MPLS cloud to another -different AS numbers you see- the three common inter-AS types were taken off the shelf and dusted off…

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Tags: 3600,7600,cisco,IP,linkedin,MP-eBGP,mpls,mtu
Categories: Networking
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Seeing this initiative made me think of my wife who has spent the last year carving out her own piece of the IT industry. Some may call me biased, true. Call it what you like, I’m taking this opportunity to put my wife in the limelight and honour her for her efforts and achievements after we relocated to the UK.

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Tags: linkedin
Categories: Main blog
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Doing a network upgrade of 28 sites, 60 services and roughly 160 old devices to just 60 devices. Python has become my friend for reading configs, creating csv files and verification. Will be posting my scripts later. I’m sure there are clever people out there who can tell me where I went wrong or what I could be doing better. However time fails me to post them right now.

Tags: cisco,linkedin,migration,nortel,python
Categories: Work
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Been hacking away as I found out I couldn’t edit a page nor did the page show up. My about page linked to the gallery instead. Spilt some blood and danced around on the keyboard loads. the result:

Note to self: DO NOT alter permalinks for pages! my about page was linked as who-am-i and this caused major issues. I also turned off the automatic XHTML corrections in the write-options page, not sure what it does so I’d rather get an error when writing a page than have my site go down. Priorities they say…

next to that my gallery now runs mod_rewrite in safe mode which works fine and I’ve re-linked an image on my about page. I recon the link was old style from WP 2.3 and older versions of WPG2 and Gallery2.

Please let me know if you find any issues, particularly with missing images. I hope all is well now and my server won’t die another terrible dead due to rewite/permalink hell.

Finally I have found the real culprit: /.htaccess was messing with things. What made it hard to find was that this file has been in place for a few years now. Upgrading WordPress to v2.7 as well as WPG2/Gallery2 tipped the balance.

What worked?
RewriteRule ^$ /wordpress/ [R=301,L]

Instead of:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/.+
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wordpress/ [R=301,L]

Tags: linkedin,mod_rewrite,XHTML
Categories: Main blog
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It appears my host was under attack this morning. Have mitigated as much as I could but there’s only so much one can do against dns ddos attacks… Sorry for todays downtime. 🙁

Categories: Main blog
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Please excuse me while I hunt some issues with this site after upgrading wordpress, gallery2 and wpg2…

Categories: Main blog
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Note to self: disable and/or clear rewrite rules before upgrading… (Still in stormy water, just testing if I can update posts now)

Tags: doh,maintenance,rewrite,site
Categories: Main blog
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I’ll leave the debate to others about running services on routers. As usual ymmv and all that, though besides the obvious objections I think it’s quite cool of my little c877 to proxy DNS and serve what it has locally. Imho, my home DNS config is not heavy enough to warrant rigging up DNS on my Samba server.

My first google tonight led me to an article on the excellent ios hints and tricks site (ioshints.info). Though this is for a full public DNS server it was a little overkill for me, please read this article as well if you do plan to go that route.

My goal was to have my DSL router serve local IP’s for a few public and local domain names. For example this allows me to use sip.djerk.nl as my proxy address in my soft-phone both at home and away.

The following code is what I ended up with.

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Tags: dns,ios,linkedin
Categories: Networking
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Not posted much about moving countries yet. As I’m on a roll I might as well just give a little update for all those who know me and wonder what I’m up to.

We’re not out of the boxes yet but working hard to get there. Hayley’s work and my CCIE are both ensuring that many hours are spent cleaning, drilling, moving and sorting. Trying to fit the same ammount of stuff in a different house is proving to be quite the challenge. It’s much like one of those kiddy puzzles where you have to move the squares around to find the picture. I often ended up picking the squares out and then putting them back in order. Sadly I can’t apply the same process here.

Due to family and work related deadlines we’ll have to get the study in order before the end of the month. Now if only I can get my phone system to behave and get myself access to nscglobals CCIE lab then I should be all set to go come March.

Tags: moving,UK
Categories: Main blog
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Not posted much recently, it’s time to add some more meat…

Last week I passed the F5 BIG-IP LTM v9.0 essentials exam. Was easier than I thought, however tomorrow I may be humbled further as I go for the advanced version of the F5 BIG-IP LTM v9.0 test. Studying with the training books from 4 days worth of training but without further hands on is not what I call fun. Admittedly it’s a lot easier than CCIE so what really am I moaning about. I suppose it the fact that I’m not studying for my next lab…

Tags: exam,F5
Categories: Main blog, Work
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Ouch. Humility is a painful process…

I’ve just been taught a lesson in humility and authorship. My post about Cisco’s NTP authentication implementation received a comment from a certain Frank. I’ve added my comment and need to verify my statment as soon as I can manage to get some hands-on in a lab again (not got Dynamips set-up yet)…

Categories: CCIE R&S
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Completed a server migration the weekend before last. Had to spend some time on my DNS configuration/migration and email. Both of which are now working as they should but www.djerk.nl doesn’t look right. Mailed the author of the vSlider3.[0|1] theme I use as it seems it’s unable to read the settings.

Odd things is the files, permissions and database are the same as what I have on the old server. Still there it looks perfect and here it doesn’t… Suggestions welcome! Reverting back to the default theme comes up fine. Where does vSlider store its settings?

[edit, 6 Feb 2008] Right, sorted the theme problem. A row in my WordPress database had gone weird, not sure what exactly went wrong but it may have been the database sync I used to keep the new server in sync with the now removed server. Anyway, I removed row vSlider from table wp_options and the theme then created a new one with default settings. Still trying to figure out what all my personalised settings were so please bear with me while I tinker away.

Categories: Main blog
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Finally some news to write. Not that I haven’t been busy but just not with CCIE. Have had too much on my mind and finally I can write about it.

Today I’ve resigned from my position at Easynet and signed with nscglobal as a Consultant. First thing while writing here is to thank Easynet for the time there, the opportunities and trust given to me. Despite moving my desk from Rotterdam to Amsterdam within six months of employment, I have thoroughly enjoyed working for Easynet. Seeing it mature from a internationally fragmented company into an upcoming global enterprise player has been both challenging and inspiring.

For those who don’t know nscglobal, they’re a UK integrator and I’ll be working in one of their London offices. This means moving from The Netherlands to the United Kingdom and we’ll be doing so physically in January. We’re looking for a rental house for multiple reasons but for this site the relevant one is my CCIE. Once in the UK I need to start focussing on my CCIE again and I hope to be able to do so with the support of some of the CCIE’s nscglobal has. So be ready for some new CCIE updates starting January.

Till then I’ll probably blog about whatever technology comes my way during the move. For example the UK mobile operator 3 has an offer with free Skype calls so I might be looking into UMTS coverage in London, Hitchin and the rest of the extended North of London. Plus I’ll be looking for a hosting location for my two servers, offers are welcome. Offers for dedicated hosting too, might help the uptime of things… My VoIP setup will have to change as well, only slightly as I’ll only be adding an FXO port at home.

Anyway just keep reading and you’ll find out, the great thing is that I don’t have to keep silent any more about what is going on and that we’re looking forward to new things.

Categories: Main blog, Work
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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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