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.

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

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....

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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I recently started using Observium (a great network monitoring package which you should use), and found that i had some useful patches to contribute fairly soon afterwards.  I submitted a patch to enable bulk selection of checkboxes in JavaScript and it was initially rejected, in part because i included my own copyright header on a new file.

(I used to love Stan Kelly-Bootle's column in Unix World, so i thought i'd share an experience a little like the ones he used to write about.  Hope some old-timers out there can get into it...)

The task i was working on involved taking a file containing a very large directory listing (about 158 MB) and determining the total size of all the files listed in it.  The file's contents looked like this:

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Within two days of its creation, my wiki guide to hardening ProCurve switches for Internet use is the first non-HP result on the Google results for "procurve hardening".  One wonders how good an idea it is, since no one else must have done it before...  To me, it just proves what a stranglehold Cisco has on the networking market.

It appears that Apple has finally worked out that they make bad servers and deprecated the Xserve.  Their solution?  Run your server OS on a workstation or mini PC.  Hmmmm....  What's more, their workstation mounted in a rack configuration takes up a whopping 6 RU.

I happened across this post on Infoworld today which is more than a year old, but still highly relevant to many organisations.  The con that is cloud computing will continue to take over traditional IT departments until organisations realise the foolishness of making IT just a service provider to "internal customers" (that's an oxymoron if ever i've heard one).

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