Today was a day filled with phone calls to Avaya Support regarding their SoftConsole application. The SoftConsole application is intended for a switchboard style view for a receptionist/attendant.

The receptionist was given a new computer with a fresh install of SoftConsole. Avaya Support was contacted, because the SoftConsole would crash and lock the computer everytime an inbound call was received.

A legacy Samba server recently stopped allowing users to connect to its shares. This was very odd, that this began happening, since this machine has been in service for years. One thing that had recently changed, was that there were some Active Directory Domain Controllers demoted to be decommissioned.
I began looking in the logs and found the following messages:

When doing any moderate to advanced networking, you are likely to have to deal with subnetting. While some people have an ability to do the binary math in their head to figure out the correct subnet-mask, I prefer to use a tool to give me the answer. I have used “ipcalc” on my FreeBSD machines for years, to give me the answers to my subnetting problems. I recently tried to use the ipcalc tool on my Fedora machine and found it to be completely different. Apparently RedHat has developed their own ipcalc tool, with the same name as another project. It is not terribly surprising that this situation could have happened, as both projects attempt to provide similar information.

In my humble opinion the RedHat ipcalc is not nearly as informative as the tool created by Krischan Jodies found at: http://jodies.de/ipcalc At their site they provide an online version, for quick access. If you want to download the tool for use on a Linux/Unix machine, it can be found at: http://jodies.de/ipcalc-archive/

When creating user accounts on servers and devices, it is important to use strong passwords that will be difficult to guess or crack. It is often preferred to at least create accounts with a random password, and allow the user to change it to something they can remember. A great Linux tool for creating passwords is “pwgen”. Most distributions have “pwgen” available in their package management resources. To install the tool on Fedora, use:

Dumping a MySQL database to a file is not a difficult task, but it is nice to be able to automate the process and have several versions archived. There is a project called “AutoMySQLBackup” available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/.

My previous post about "Use a Cisco IOS Switch to Serve DHCP to Avaya Phones" was inspired by my need to quickly test connectivity with a remote site. The solution worked very well for us. Eventually we were able to deploy a server to handle all DHCP, and needed to switch over to the services on the box. My initial reaction was to simply use the "no service dhcp" command to disable DHCP, followed by adding an "ip helper-address" to the VLAN interfaces. Surprisingly the DHCP server never received any of the requests. After comparing configurations with another switch, I discovered I needed to re-run the "service dhcp" command. I had compared the "show proc | include DHCP" and noticed the DHCP processes missing on my new switch. Apparently the "ip helper-address" uses some of those DHCP services for analyzing and forwarding to the server. I ended up just removing all the "ip dhcp pool" statements to keep things clean and from causing any conflicts.

Avaya VoIP phones require a special option in a DHCP scope, so they know how to make calls. There may be times where it is desirable to have the DHCP running on a piece of networking equipment on a remote site, so that a separate server is not needed for the role. In this example there are two VLANs on each port of a Cisco switch running IOS. VLAN 52 is for user traffic, and VLAN 222 is for the VoIP traffic.

Juniper tends to have pretty good documentation in their knowledgebase, on how to configure equipment for different situations. I recently had to setup a VPN between a Juniper SSG-140 (at HQ) and a remote Cisco PIX. Going to Juniper's knowledgebase, you would most likely come across the article: http://kb.juniper.net/KB4147 . This article describes setting up a "route-based" VPN between the two devices. I believe these directions would work if you were trying to connect on subnet on each end.

I previously posted on how to "Create a VLAN Trunk between Cisco CatOS and a Foundry BigIron". During the same project I also had to create a trunk between Cisco IOS and a Foundry BigIron. Anyone who has used both CatOS and IOS know that there is a significant difference in configuring them to do the same thing. I felt it made sense to keep these posts separate, to keep people from getting confused.

In this specific situation I had to find a way to trunk multiple vlans between a Cisco 3500 IOS and a Foundry BigIron switch.

I had the need to install FreeSWAN on an old RedHat Linux 7.3 machine. While most people's initial reaction would be to upgrade the system, we all know this is not always an option.

I initially tried to do a simple "rpmbuild --rebuild..." but that did not do the trick. I would get "unresolved symbol..." errors. However, I finally found a way to get the kernel module to compile correctly.