Liberty Systems & Software

Background

I first came across HP's A5500 switches when i started looking at configuring VRRP and distributed trunking to provide routing redundancy for the core of a client's campus network using two ProCurve 5400 switches. I found that i could get a new pair of A5500s for around the same price as the software license upgrade on the 5400s (multicast routing, distributed trunking, and OSPF cost extra), and they came with a much broader range of features.

It seems in the merging of Oracle.com and Sun.com, Sun's blueprints site has disappeared from view.  A lot of it was very specific to Sun hardware & software, but it had much general applicability as well.  One of the treasures in their collection was a series of three documents on understanding NTP (Network Time Protocol), called "Using NTP to Control and Synchronize System Clocks".  Thanks to the Internet Archive, they are still available, and i thought i'd throw up some links here so they won't be forgotten:

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2011-09-20: Edited to add section about IPv6 options; minor cleanup; references added....

Just a quick post today - here's a great article from Cory Doctorow on his computing experiences with Ubuntu and Lenovo ThinkPad X series.

It must be the week for stupid error messages.  I just tried to create a private SSL certificate for one of our server VMs from our Novell eDirectory iManager server.  The CSR was created by OpenSSL on the command line on the Ubuntu server, and i copied it to my laptop with the filename "req".  When i tried to issue the certificate through iManager > Novell Certificate Server > Issue Certificate, it gave me the singularly unenlightening error:

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Last week i made some fairly significant changes on a client's production firewall/routing cluster during our maintenance window.  The next morning there were reports of file server drives not connecting correctly and inaccessible web sites.  Because all wireless-to-wired and Internet traffic goes through this cluster, the firewall changes were the obvious culprit.  Looking at the logs it turned out we had run out of space in the connection tracking table:

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I tweeted about the HP LaserJet P2035n a while back, and things have only gotten worse for me since.  To summarise: it has no SSL support for administration, its SNMP response is patchy (see graph below), and it isn't supported by JetAdmin.  This last point was underscored to me yesterday: i realised that the particular printer i've been monitoring is running an older firmware version (from 2008), so i went looking for an updated one.  I found it on HP's web site (eventually - that remains a rant for another day), downloaded it to my Je...

Edit, 2011-05-03: To all those poor souls who have been directed here by Google in their search for best practices on IPv4 and/or IPv6 subnet allocations (or worse, the HP A5500's NAT capabilities), please accept my sincere apologies.  This page is more about asking questions than providing answers....

One of my clients had some very interesting Internet traffic statistics last week.  We came in Thursday morning and found that overnight we had downloaded over 700 GB of data from our ISP (UQ SchoolsNet).

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The Register has a review of the Ubuntu 11.04 beta release which suggests there are some rocky times for existing Ubuntu users ahead.  The part the article that stuck out to me reads:

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