Crappy Traffic Graphing

Published on Dec. 30, 2007

Status: 10% I've heard that Sydney is one of the most livable cities in the entire world -- a statement I would generally agree with. However. whoever made this statement obviously didn't drive to work every day. I've reached the conclusion that one of the biggest (and only) drawbacks to Sydney, is the traffic. So why is the traffic this bad? I have a few theories. The first theory is that Sydney drivers aren't particularly cordial. I mean, the road could be ending on the merging lane and drivers still won't let you in. I've literally sat for two blocks in near deadlock traffic with my blinker on, and nobody would let me in. Combine this with the ... Read more.

Small Business Server 2003

Published on Dec. 11, 2007

Status: I've recently been hired for a company that does consulting for small businesses. Naturally, I haven't had a huge exposure to SBS. My employer asked me to take the SBS MCP Certification, and this afternoon, I passed. The exam was pretty easy -- I think Microsoft basically took the easy questions spread out across the MCSE and dumped them into the SBS exam (some of the questions were very similar). My tips to anybody taking the exam: Really know the benefits and drawbacks of SBS; for instance, it has to be the root of the forest, Premium vs. Standard, it comes with Exchange/SQL/ISA, always use the wizards first... The exam is a showcase for ... Read more.

MBA Funding

Published on March 5, 2007

Progress: 10% I've mostly, about 90%, made up my mind to go pursue further education. But one major problem exists: where am I going to get $40-50k (USD)?! I've never been in debt before, and while I know debt-management is important for a company (takes money to make money), I'm sure not going into debt unless I 100% have to. And I certainly don't have quite that much money just sitting in the bank account, so I figure it is time to do some planning. The first obvious question is: where can I get that kind of money? Order of acceptability: Earn it. Beg online for it. Maybe pretend to eat a kitten, take cute picture. Get ... Read more.

MCSE: Security

Published on Nov. 8, 2006

Status: My buddy Ian and myself have decided to get our MCSEs. However, Ian is a Mac lover, and I can't seem to stay away from Linux (and I'm too cheap right now to buy a MacBook). The irony might be subtle, yet we are still studying and making progress. For the most part, I have decided to take the tests in the following order: 70-290, Security+, 70-270, 70-291, 70-293, 70-294, 70-298, 70-299 Update: So, now I'm MCSE. I'm still debating whether or not to do the final Security test. I really need to get caught up with Exchange, so I might do the Messaging test at some point, but who knows. At this point ... Read more.

Xen + nVidia

Published on Nov. 2, 2006

Status: I've played with quite a bit of virtualization, especially VMWare for ages. About eight months ago I started to play around with Xen, and got it to work great, except for the fact that the nvidia driver wouldn't work with the Xen kernel. That said, I'm gonna give another go. Throughout senior high, and especially my last year, I managed to score a bunch of crappy motherboards and random parts and pieces. Six or so years later, my parents are still finding old motherboards. Considering these computers were mainly P120s with 64-128 megs of RAM, they weren't so hot. What is one to do? As you could guess, when I started university I had ... Read more.

Another VPN Node

Published on Sept. 8, 2006

Status: After consulting several vendors in Kuala Lumpur, I was able to get the right Cisco with the right IOS. One of their technicians came and installed it, and that night I hooked it up to our VPN. Besides the fact that the internet distribution is still a little shady in Kuala Lumpur, the connection remains somewhat stable, and yet another node is brought on the company intranet. Read more.

Monitoring Traffic Usage

Published on Aug. 29, 2006

Status: One of the greatest benefits, in my opinion, of Cisco routers is the ability to generate netflows. In a lot of ways, I would prefer to do this than implement some appliance (say, using ntop). The ability to analyse the amount of traffic becomes extremely valuable. Not only can one measure the amount of traffic, but the type of traffic that is being generated through the network. Using a similar configuration, I setup all four Ciscos to export netflows that stream back to a server in the States. I decided to use nfdump as a collector. After the dumps are collected, it is simple to setup nfsen to parse and analyse the received ... Read more.

LDAP Backend

Published on July 7, 2006

Status: Users don't like to remember passwords, heck, I don't like to remember to use passwords. I decided to upgrade all the webapps to authenticate off the domain, welcome a start to SSO. To do this I implemented the adldap php class to control authentication to each webapp. Thus, a simple GPO can control who has access to the app or not. A simple solution to a rather simple problem. Read more.