Archive for October, 2007

WPA-PSK authentication with Cisco IOS

Friday, October 26th, 2007

When my Linux firewall box died a couple of months ago, I finally decided to by a Cisco router for my Internet connection. Before the Linux box I had an OpenBSD firewall, and I decided it was time to learn yet another platform.

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IBM SDD driver troubleshooting on Linux

Friday, October 26th, 2007

The Subsystem Device Driver [SDD] is a pseudo device driver designed to support the multipath configuration environments in the IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server, the IBM TotalStorage DS family, the IBM SystemStorage SAN Volume Controller. It resides in a host system with the native disk device driver and provides the following functions:

- Enhanced data availability
- Dynamic I/O load-balancing across multiple paths
- Automatic path failover protection
- Concurrent download of licensed internal code
- Path-selection policies for the host system

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Bootstrapping an Ubuntu guest for Xen

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

First, some empty disk space is needed. Let’s create a logical volume for our new virtual machine:

root@xenserver1:~# lvcreate -n testlv -L 10G vg0
  Logical volume “testlv” created

Create a filesystem on the new logical volume:

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How to get VMware Server working with an unsupported kernel and the vmware-any-any patch

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

VMware Server needs exactly two kernel modules running on the host system (there are separate modules for guest systems). These are the vmmon and the vmnet modules. Unfortunately, the vmmon and vmnet packages included in the VMware server distribution package don’t compile with the newest kernels. When I upgraded my laptop to Gutsy Gibbon a few weeks ago, I forgot to check if VMware server supports the new kernel. And, of course, it doesn’t yet. But luckily I found the vmware-any-any package, a patched version of the host kernel modules that works with newer kernel versions.

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Updated version of the flash64.sh script for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

A few months ago I released a script to install a 32-bit Adobe Flash plugin to a 64-bit Firefox, but it doesn’t seem to work in Gutsy beta. Here’s an updated one. I upgraded my laptop to Gutsy and used this one to get Flash working.

Edit: I did a complete reinstall later and learned that Gutsy knows how to set this up by itself. So there’s no need for this script anymore. And that is a very positive thing!

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Getting a Certificate for your Web Server

Monday, October 1st, 2007

To communicate securely using SSL (also known as TLS or Transport Layer Security), web servers need a key pair of public and private keys. This key pair can be generated and signed by yourself, but to prevent the web browser from asking “stupid” questions about the validity of a certificate, you must pay a company, called a Certificate authority, such as Verisign, Geotrust, or Thawte, for the added simplicity. That company will then verify that you are who you are (in theory, at least) and then sign your public key with their certificate. Their certificate is already bundled with most browsers and thus trusted by default, which also makes your newly signed certificate trusted as well.

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