Posts tagged technology

minne-demo

What does MinneDemo mean to me?

ipHouse has been a long time sponsor of MinneStar. I was lucky enough to attend two years of MinneBar and so far this year I was able to attend a MinneDemo event as well.

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What is a WiFi Controller?

WiFi controller solutions have become pretty popular for Enterprises lately. Some of the benefits of why you would want them are.

  • Centralized management over several to many access-points.
  • Unified access policies.
  • Ease of deployment.
  • Rogue AP scanning for PCI/DSS compliance.

Feature freeze

Some of us took the time last week to create something new. I chose to challenge myself by designing a system I had not built before and that I am not ready to share… quite yet. :) But I do want to share something about the design process in very general terms.

The lesson I learned: Feature freeze is a good thing. Know when to stop fixing.

Now early in the project, I had a pretty good idea of what pieces needed to go together but I did not have a very good idea of how to get there. I put down a quick design and while I was doing that I started to see problems..

  • Pieces did not fit together.
  • Some things were missing.
  • This was not going to work.

Time to start learning. I love learning.

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Debugging IPSec VPNs in FortiGate

Debugging IPSec VPNs in FortiGate

Debugging what is going wrong with a VPN setup is difficult. The IKE protocol is “chatty”, and negotiates back and forth between the two ends for several rounds. The GUI offers not much help, it is either  UP or Down. Most of the real debugging happens inside the CLI.

One problem in particular that has always bugged me is that you need access to the end machines involved to initiate traffic across the link. The network admin typically doesn’t have direct access on the computers on either side of the VPN in order to initiate that traffic. I’ll show you a method that can be used to initiate traffic from that network as well.
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FreeBSD 9 and ZFS version 28, THANK YOU!

I’m excited! My favorite operating system, FreeBSD, has gotten an upgrade! There are a lot of small changes but the big one (the one that I’m excited about) is getting ZFS version 28 into the kernel.

ZFS Version 28 adds some of the more important features of ZFS: Deduplication, triple parity RAIDZ3, and RAIDZ. This means that I can have full featured storage devices, running ZFS natively, via FreeBSD.

As a bonus I don’t have to learn Solaris.

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