The ramblings of a computer geek
The OSI Model (Open Systems Interconnection) model is a set of rules and requirements to model and conceptualise the communication between two (network) systems. Yes, its theory, but in computing and networking it can be useful to use as a basic guide when troubleshooting. It helps you to rule-in or rule-out where a problem might … Read more
Notepad++ can be quite a handy tool to use, I often use it when building up bulk CLI commands to enter into switches or firewalls. Say you had a list of hosts and wanted to add some text to the beginning, that’s fairly easy, you just click, hold ALT and then select all the lines, … Read more
A fairly simple approach to providing uplink resilience. There are methods like EAPS or MLAG to give you uplink resilience, but sometimes you just need something simple. A redundant physical (or “Redundant Phy”) is essentially two uplinks to upstream switches and to avoid a loop, the downstream switch (i.e. the one with the redundant phy … Read more
If you wish to share a password with a user there’s various ways you can achieve it. But not all of them are secure! Let’s say you have the scenario that you are onboarding a user or you’ve had to reset their password for some reason. If that person is on-site, that’s pretty easy, you … Read more
Seen this issue a few times even on the NimbleOS 5.x version, when joining the array to Active Directory for authentication, you get this error when performing via the GUI: The only way i’ve found around this is to perform via the CLI on the Nimble, you should also pre-create the computer object in AD … Read more
NagiosXI and other monitoring tools have ways to determine if your SSL certificates on say a web server are nearing expiry, but what if you have software that uses a certificate but that certificate is not directly poll-able over the standard HTTPS checks. The script which can be found here, is a passive check, so … Read more
IMPORTANT! The below scripts are not supported by Dell nor is there use on a Dell ECS node, you therefore utilise these steps at your own risk. We have these scripts running on Dell ECS nodes in production to collect hardware information and report it back periodically and no issues have been identified yet. The … Read more
A very short introduction into using Python and the InfoBlox Python libraries to interact with the REST API to give you a starting point for development. https://sifbaksh.com/introduction-to-infoblox-api-wapi-using-python/ The easiest approach is to use the InfoBlox-Client library in Python, it is possible to use “requests” and then parse the output, but this approach seems a bit … Read more
I’ve used Clonezilla a few times in the past, its a quick and convenient way to replace a hard disk (e.g. upgrading from a spinning rust disk to an SSD) in your machine without needing to rebuild the OS from scratch. But Clonezilla can also be used to clone the disk to an image, as … Read more
A quick and effective way to get additional desktop space is to use a USB Graphics Adapter, in my case I used the Star Tech USB32VGAPRO. It supports a good range of resolutions but in my case I wanted to use 1680×1050 which is the same as my in-built graphics resolution outputs at. However when … Read more