The ramblings of a computer geek
Tristan Self 
I was working on an issue whereby we were looking at traffic flow problem to a Dell Powerscale, attempting to identify why a particular VLAN was not able to be communicated with, we were unsure if the issue was network or storage. Luckily the Dell Powerscale includes “tcpdump”, so in this case we setup a … Read more
Attempting to purchase an in-app purchase (to buy coins) in Minecraft on an Amazon Fire Tablet I was constantly being told that my Amazon password was incorrect. The issue turned out to be down to OTP being enabled on my Amazon account, using Google Authenticator. To resolve the issue, it involved entering the password, with … Read more
Becoming professionally registered is a great way to develop your career, drive your continuing professional development (CPD), while demonstrating to society and employers your commitment to the discipline. But what are the differing standards (levels) of registration, and what are the differences…..really? In this short article I’ll briefly summerise what I think the main differences … Read more
The Extreme Networks VOSS FabricEngine switches allow for the port partitioning (channelising) of a QSFP28 or QSFP+ port the same as is the case on an Extreme Networks XOS (SwitchEngine) switch. The following example details how this can be completed. The following was used to complete the testing and proof of operation: In this example 100Gbit QSFP28 interface which … Read more
We had a request to enable AVX2 on a virtual machine. AVX2 are virtualisation extensions, essentially its providing processor instructions through from the physical CPU that are for optimizing virtualisation. In simple terms allow a virtual machine to be able to run virtualised workloads. You would need to enable this setting if you wanted to … Read more
When attempting to copy (clone) a VMDK, we were experiencing the issue that a copy of a VMDK would get to about 100% then fail. Performing via the Web UI or via the CLI (from a host directly) would give the same issue. We attempted this on another VM and it worked fine, it turned … Read more
Emails are made up of a header and body, the body may be HTML or plain text, and any attachments are encoded within the body of the email for it to be sent. We have applied limits to our email infrastructure to reduce load, bandwidth, and disk space but also to protect recipients of our … Read more
If you need to perform a Ping scan of a subnet, you can use the following command, its quick and dirty approach, although its not really that quick when it comes to actually running. The below will scan the subnet 192.168.1.0/24, from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254. If you want to speed things up a bit, you … Read more
The lowly Format command provides some simple, yet fairly effective data destruction for hard disks that you have on your machine. Although this technique may not be suitably effective for all data destruction requirements, it is fairly thorough in the destruction of data on a disk; such as one you wish to reuse for another … Read more
NagiosXI has a multitude of ways of monitoring hosts or services. Typically with a Microsoft Windows or Linux host you can monitor using SNMP, but you may also now want to check out the NCPA agent as a way to monitor from NagiosXI. Newer versions of NagiosXI also give the ability to administer, update and … Read more