Network Administration Articles

Best Modern Practices – Cisco MDS 9000 (Fibre Channel) – Part 2 {07-12-2010}

Back to Part 1… Use Your MDS to Its Full Potential! If you’ve taken some time looking through all the thousands of things NX-OS and Fabric Manager can do, you’ll know that the MDS line is amazingly powerful. I’m totally a CLI guy, and I do most of the basic switch configuration in NX-OS, but [...]

Best Modern Practices – Cisco MDS 9000 (Fibre Channel) – Part 1 {07-12-2010}

We recently got a pair of shiny new Compellent SANs at work – both a primary and DR setup which replicate to each other. Seriously awesome stuff (Sales pitch mode – I don’t work for Compellent, but they make an amazing product, and Data Progression in the bomb. Check them out if your organization is [...]

Ping Failover Daemon for Linux {02-24-2010}

Overview I wanted to make available a GPL daemon I developed for Linux called the “ping failover daemon”, or pfailover. It is designed for hosts with two or more network interfaces, with the goal of rerouting traffic over the secondary interface when the primary fails. It achieves this by monitoring a host over the primary [...]

How to Move the COS (esxconsole.vmdk) in VMware ESX 4 (vSphere) {02-21-2010}

We recently upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere at work, and man – is it awesome. The infrastructure manager (vSphere Client) supports a whole boatload of new options for better monitoring and managing your VMs and clusters – including a patch management system for keeping your VMs and hosts up to date. If you’d like [...]

IAS Shared Secrets Aren’t So Secret {08-16-2009}

Though by night I practice in the dark arts of computer science and engineering, during the day I play the part of a mild mannered network administrator. Recently I was taking stock of our backups, and as I was looking through some items that needed to be included in the nightly routine, I checked out [...]