Recently, there was a thread over at Packet Pushers about what folks use for their daily workflow. I quickly realized that my setup is pretty simple (as I like it) and relied on a large amount of terminal based tools, which makes sense since I have been a UNIX (or UNIX based) OS user since my migration from the original MacOS back in the 1990s. Anyway, Since I wrote most of this up already, I thought I’d post it here:
How-To
Recently I was poking around Mail.app, setting up my new machine. I like to keep redundant copies of everything, email being no exception. I have backups of all of my email dating back to 1998, for the most part. It has come in handy from time to time and I like it for reference reasons. It’s a small amount of actual data as far as space goes, and it’s easy to do. I remembered the days of using mutt for email (which really weren’t that long ago for me), and really liked the…
I’ve recently decided that even though I love the BSD style MacPorts system, it can be too clunky to maintain and doesn’t handle dependancies as well as I’d like (much like the actual BSD ports collection). So, in doing a little looking I found that Fink is still out of date, but Homebrew is very simple and also really elegant comparatively speaking.
I have huge iPhoto and iTunes catalogs. This can present a problem for both loading the applications and for backup. I have learned to deal with the Application load times, but backups are very important to me.
I was recently helping my brother-in-law out with the new Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3 TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive
Since the drive comes in a file system that is not HFS+ Journaled, it needed to be reformatted to support time machine backups.
Simple, right? “A five…
Regardless of the fact that there is now a good ISSU-like service for the SRX (named Low-Impact Cluster Upgrade; LICU for short), if you’re upgrading your Active/Active cluster from something that isn’t 10.4, or if you just aren’t comfortable with how baked LICU actually is, you’ll need to know how to move the junos code around. This is easy if you have physical access to both nodes, but for those that have.
This was a problem for me in that our cluster nodes have…
I recently needed to upgrade a few MX480 routers and decided that it would be a good opportunity to get some experience with Juniper’s in service software upgrade.
I’d read a bit about it but I’d not had the chance to really use it. It’s pretty straightforward and it does what it claims. The following are my notes from rolling through this on my test lab MX480.
I know this is documented elsewhere, but this was a pain for me, so I wanted to take some notes. I have several Snow Leopard (MAcOS 10.6) Macs and a Netgear DNS-323. I want to mount the drive using NFS and any good UNIX admin would.
Unlike older versions of the Mac OS, NFS mounts are now handled under the Disk Utility application (which seems odd to me, but whatever).
So, to make this work right I had to do the following:
First, I had to make sure that the NFS Add-on was installed on the…
I knew a tool like this had to exist, but I had never needed to look in the past. While debugging a RA problem, I come upon the need to view IPv6 router advertisements. How can one do this? tcpdump? Yeah, I guess that could work. It’s almost like using a bulldozer when a wheelbarrow is all you need, though. I could use ndpmon, I suppose, but that, too seems like overkill.
So, the search began. After about 10 seconds of google searching….. Success! A tool, does in fact exist…
*IDP signatures need to be updated often. On the SRX platform, there is also the notion of a “detector”. This also meeds to be updated on a regular basis. it seems. Over the past few weeks, we’ve needed to update the IDP signatures and detector on our SRX 5800 cluster several times, and the results have normally been fine.
Updating the IDP signatures has never been that big of a problem (see postings about updating stuff on cluster nodes). But we ran into issues due to the…