Cisco CLI Noob Tip – You need to ramp up your permission level to do stuff…

nbeam published 11 years ago in Cisco, Networking. Tags: , , ,

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Working on something well outside of my experience range recently (typical…), namely Cisco switch administration. In particular, I was working on a Cisco Catalyst 3560 switch which apparently doesn’t have quite as robust of a user-friendly web-gui as I would have liked. A couple years back I setup a SPAN port (aka Mirror port) on this switch as we were setting up Snort IDS for the network here and needed a sniffer port. Fast-forward a year and our network configuration has changed and we no longer need this to be a SPAN port and I couldn’t remember how I set it up (or how to take it away).

I know very little about the Cisco Command-Line interface but after Googling around to five different sites I was able to speculate/guess what needed to be done.
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NTP is NECESSARY for OpenVPN + Google Authenticator to Work Reliably…

nbeam published 11 years ago in Linux, Networking, OpenVPN, Ubuntu, VPN. Tags: , , , , , , ,

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Google Authenticator, and (all?) other rotating-pin multi-factor authentication systems, rely on the clock on the token device (in this case your smart-phone or tablet) and the authenticating system (in this case the OpenVPN server). If the clocks are different by more than a few seconds or so, it will break your authentication. (more…)

MySQL Tuning

nbeam published 11 years ago in Database Administration, MySQL. Tags: , , ,

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Working on some performance tuning for MySQL today. Here are by far the best resources I have found:

Best General Tuning Guide:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/09/29/what-to-tune-in-mysql-server-after-installation/

Expanded point from that Guide:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/11/03/choosing-innodb_buffer_pool_size/

I ran into an issue when I adjusted a log file size (MySQL wouldn’t start), this was the fix:
http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/1261/how-to-safely-change-mysql-innodb-variable-innodb-log-file-size

In my case MySQL was running on a dedicated VPS with 2 Gb of Ram so I had quite a bit of room to work. If you are on shared hosting or even a VPS sharing space with Apache your numbers are going to look different. This was, of course, an effort to fix performance on a Drupal site that was running really really rough even though it has low traffic. The tuning helped a lot but I still have a ways to go.

Anyhow, thought I would pass the helpful links along as anyone searching for MySQL Performance tuning should be finding this stuff first imho.

Cheers!

Recommended Drupal Module – String Overrides – Replace default text on your site with something else…

nbeam published 11 years ago in Drupal, Web Administration. Tags: ,

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String Overrides is a phenomenally versatile module that will make your life MUCH easier if you are administering a Drupal website. The basic premise is this…

There is a “string” of text on my website that I need to replace with something else. I have used it a few places, here is a particular use-case:
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Today’s learnings in Drupal… Hiding the “Request New Password” tab/form

nbeam published 11 years ago in CSS, Drupal, Web Administration. Tags: , ,

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The company I work for operates an internal drupal websites that I built. Everyone authenticates using their Microsoft Active Directory user accounts. That means that Microsoft Active Directory handles their passwords and email addresses and a host of other things that Drupal would normally handle if we were just authenticating against the database. Therefore one item that I no longer want to display (as it has led to end user confusion…) is the “Request New Password” tab that appears on the user login page.
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