phaq

I always wondered about an obscure behaviour observed in my home network.

Whenever I access my website using it’s plain domain name (http://phunsites.net), I’d end up with a password prompt from my DSL router.

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So you’ve got one of these nice decent Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) connected to a multi-terabyte storage system?
One of the nasty things to get done is SAN zoning. Unfortunately, Cisco’s UCS doesn’t help much about getting this done automagically on the MDS SAN switches.
This is however no big deal to automate using a little script magic.
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Gosh … today seems to be the day of a thousand troubles.
First I had to fiddle arround getting my RS232-to-usb dongle to work on Snow Leopard, second the Cisco MDS9124 switches fools me around with an unreachable IP management interface.
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Murphy stroke again. This time he crushed my RS232 USB-to-serial dongle, which used to work fine on my MacBook Pro running OS X.

I use a very basic Aten UC-232A dongle. There exist various variations out there, but most of them contain a PL-2303 chip, so despite some of them looking very different in design they’re basically the same thing.
Obviously mine stopped working after upgrading from OS X 10.5.x to 10.6.x “Snow Leopard”.

Looking for alternate drivers I came along a few sites, including some driver update pages which requered me to pay for it.
Oh wait a minute … paying for a device driver? Gosh … get lost!
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Right before “mv’ing /dev/myself to /var/home” I came along another odd thing on my border router.

An IPv6 peer was unreachable, i.e. did not respond to ICMP ping, as such the BGP session was down as well.
I gave it another indepth look as it happened to be one of our IPv6 upstream peers and had some sort of importance as such.
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If you’re all too familiar with Cisco, then you will – as well as I do – struggle accross some weirdnesses on the Foundry/Brocade routers every now and then.

Not too long ago I fought around with a BGP issue on the XMR 4000.
My problem was that the XMR would announce just about any IPv6 prefix to all BGP peers, despite the fact that I had a configuration in place, which should effectifely only announce my own prefixes.
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Well, well, well …

I just stumbled accross a minor difference in ACL handling between Cisco and Foundry, the latter being mostly Cisco-alike.
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Recently I invested some development time on my company’s PXE-based network boot system. While pxelinux serves as a general purpose network boot loader at our site, current demands required further extension beyond it’s capabilities. The main reason for this was the inability of pxelinux to be used for certain bootstrap scenarios. As an example to this we may note FreeBSD. While it can be booted from floppy images or an hd-converted ISO-image via pxelinux’s memdisk loader, this actually has some serious limitations.
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